My Name is Jim Kirk
by mattmetzger
Summary: If Jim can't quit drinking, then he's never going to be able to fix his life and apologise for what he's done - to his boss, his colleagues, his friends, and most importantly, his ex-boyfriend. His name is Jim Kirk - and he's an alcoholic.
1. Rice

****Notes: This is a somewhat unusual format for me. There will be two chapters in the present day, followed by an interlude, followed by two chapters, etc. Each interlude will progress through Jim and Spock's relationship from 2005 to 2010. Please note the dates, because some of them are significant.****

****Warnings**: alcoholism, strong language, explicit sexual situations, explicit violence, mentions of self-harm. Any warnings particularly relevent to a chapter will appear at the head of said chapter.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek: 2009, and I make no profit from this work.**

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><p><em>Rice<em>

Sulu had been pushing him to go for weeks – hell, _really _he'd been pushing for months, ever since Jim had called him at seven in the morning drunk off his ass, but he'd only been really _obvious _for the last eight weeks or so – but Jim only made the decision to go at all when he opened the kitchen cupboard on Tuesday afternoon and realised that he was out of rice.

It was a stupid realisation, but there it was. For four and a half years, Jim had always had a permanently good rice supply. He never ran out; he never even let it run low. He ran out of other things – pasta, ready meals, bacon, _tea_ – just like any other schmuck who'd forgotten to go to the store after work, but for four and a half years he had always, _always _had rice. If there was nothing else in the house but a powdered soup packet or an egg rolled to hide at the back of the fridge, he would _still _have rice.

He'd punched the cupboard door, then sat at the kitchen table nursing bruised knuckles and wondering when he'd not noticed that he was running low on rice. _Fuck_.

It wasn't even really about the rice. It was just up there with all the other shit he'd never thought would ever hurt in the last six months. For fuck's sake, why would running out of fucking _rice _ever upset anyone?

Only it did. Just like realising nobody had rearranged the tins in the cupboards so the oldest ones were at the front in _months_. Just like realising the wok had been up on the shelf so long it had gathered dust. Just like coming out of his bedroom some mornings and realising nobody had put his dirty clothing in the hamper, or even in the washing machine.

He hadn't expected _these _things to hurt. He'd expected the loneliness of the bed, and the lack of interest in mealtimes because there was nobody to talk to, and the constant _quiet_, and the coming home to a dark and empty house after work, and no kiss goodbye before _going _to work. He'd expected those bits.

He hadn't expected the rice.

The rice made him go. It was stupid, really. Four in the afternoon and he'd been determined not to go – an _AA _meeting? Really? Come on – it would just be a bunch of old ladies moaning about their husbands and how good a glass of red wine would be with the daytime television, and maybe the odd unemployed guy moaning about how stressful having kids was 'now that our financial situation is different.' It wouldn't _help_. And it would be run by some jackass bleeding heart _fuckwit _who didn't have the slightest fucking clue about what it was _like _and how much Jim had _fucked the fuck up_.

But staring at the empty jar where the rice was supposed to be, at four fifteen in the afternoon, changed his mind. So he'd fucking go, already. It was better – it had to be better – than sitting in the house for the night, missing his old life and wondering just how the _hell _he was meant to make this better _without _a bottle.

Because he couldn't. He just _couldn't_. It was too late for that – and really, without Sulu, Jim wouldn't even be sober enough to notice he was clean outta rice.

So he glared at the note stuck to his fridge – _Kalona, 7pm, directions on the pamphlet in the hall and go, you self-pitying cocksucker! _– and figured that it couldn't hurt.

_More_, at least.

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><p>McCoy liked Iowa. Iowa was like Georgia – it was empty, it was quiet, and it was more or less devoid of those damn hippie kids who thought they had the world figured out. They ran off to the big cities out west, and if they ever did turn up in McCoy's line of work, then it was fifteen years older with a sense of reality finally beaten into them.<p>

Oh, McCoy had been one of those kids. Twenty years old, he'd been convinced and _arrogant _about his place in the world. He didn't have problems back then, apart from corrupt politicians and the evils of capitalism and the fact that his girlfriend really didn't do as much for the environment as she could.

He'd grown up since then.

At twenty, he'd never guessed which way his life was headed, and yet now, at just the wrong side of thirty-two, he couldn't say that he was entirely surprised. He'd gone from engaged and expectant father with a brand new medical degree and a rather disgusting amount of optimism with a middle-of-the-country, ten-bedrooms-and-begging-for-a-brood house in the middle of back-ass Georgia, to...

To a bedsit in Iowa City, evenings spent encouraging other people not to be like him, and the odd spiteful message from his ex-wife telling him how much better off their baby girl was without him around. Twelve years, and he'd managed to fuck it up more than he would have ever guessed during his smug teenage years and the brink of adulthood.

And yet...somehow, he'd gotten used to it.

When the ex-wife had told him to take his bag and his booze and his _goddamn _baseball and get out of her _county_, if not the state, a sympathetic colleague had pointed him in the direction of an opening at one of the south Iowan hospitals. He'd bounced around a couple of them, and someone had noticed his odd manner of therapy and surprising success with it, and pushed him into _this _job.

So it wasn't keeping old rich folk alive longer than was strictly necessary in the summer heat in Georgia, but...if anything, it was more necessary. He'd never say it was _better_ – he missed his home, and summer thunderstorms, and being woken up at ungodly hours of the morning after a long night's shift because Jo just _had _to show Daddy the picture she drew. He _missed _that life – but at least this new life had something to it.

Tuesday nights were spent in Kalona. He spent most of his evenings driving out and driving back from various chapters – Mondays in West Liberty, Tuesdays in Kalona, Fridays in Iowa City itself, and every other Saturday going up to Cedar Rapids for a daytime chapter that held reinforcement workshops. But Tuesdays were Kalona, the group he'd been pushed to take on first, and so his most well-known.

The Kalona chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous was a small one – barely big enough to exist, really, and it wouldn't if the grateful and wealthy husband of a reformed alcoholic in Cedar Rapids hadn't pushed for them to open one up down here. It consisted of maybe ten regulars – mostly middle-aged women and a couple of younger men who'd dropped out of school early and found no dream or cause to keep them out of trouble. The men came and went, usually pushed into it by court orders and community service requirements; the women tended to stay longer, but would inevitably believe (in a way the men didn't) that there was a cure for alcoholism, and would eventually drift away.

McCoy had taken over leadership of several of the AA chapters in the area after a colleague at one of his A&E stints in Iowa City had seen him handle multiple drunken incidents and had decided that he simply _had _to do it. McCoy didn't mind; he still worked morning shifts in the hospital, and his pay was hardly anything to turn his nose up at, but Jocelyn would have laughed herself into a coma at the very idea. A reformed alcoholic telling _other _alcoholics why they shouldn't drink? Yeah, right.

But it was alright work, and McCoy supposed he could see the value in a group leader who knew the score. He certainly hadn't appreciated that permanently-single marriage counsellor all those years ago.

Still, the Kalona chapter were a usually peaceable group – muttering about pests and local kids and goddamn it, why did the local diner have nothing but water and cheap, shitty beer that wouldn't get a squirrel drunk – and any wandering newbies too reluctant to talk watching in bitter silence.

McCoy arrived to find one such newbie that Tuesday evening.

He'd not seen him before – and he would have remembered a leather jacket like that – and didn't doubt, from the scowl and the sullen silence as introductions went round the circle, that he wouldn't see him again unless a court had ordered him to be here. He was in his mid-twenties, needed a shave, and had alarmingly blue eyes – but he didn't say a word to McCoy as he kicked off the meeting, or to anybody else. He remained silent through the tales of weekly woes from the regulars, and through the introductions offered up by the two other newbies, and shook his head silently when McCoy invited him to speak.

It wasn't until the meeting ended that he stirred, and approached McCoy instead of leaving.

"You're Dr. McCoy?" he asked.

"Yeah, that'd be me," McCoy drawled. "Been heading up the Kalona chapter for the past two years."

The man shrugged. "Friend of mine recommended coming to these things, but I gotta say it – I'm not for group therapy."

"It's support rather than therapy," McCoy returned, "but okay. Some people don't like talking it out, and you don't have to say a damn thing until you're ready to. But why are you here if you don't want to _use _that support?"

"Like I say, a friend told me about it."

"Anyone I know?"

"No."

He said it flatly and without room for argument, so McCoy didn't bother to debate it. Plenty of people recommended AA without having ever been.

"Okay then. I gotta go. See you next week," McCoy tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the door. It was a public community hall, and there was some yoga bullshit for old ladies after the chapter meetings. The woman who ran it was already standing in the doorway and glowering at him.

"Hey," the man called after him. "What makes you qualified to fuckin' run these things anyway?"

"I'm a doctor."

"So what? Doesn't mean you get shit," the man challenged as he followed McCoy out into the parking lot. It was the middle of summer and even though the sun was sinking below a flat horizon, it was still hot.

McCoy dumped his bag on the hood of his car and turned to face the leather-jacketed idiot. He stood confident in his anger, like McCoy had all those years ago, and the doctor snorted.

"My name is Leonard H. McCoy, and I've been sober for three years, four months, and twelve days. _That's _why I'm qualified to 'fucking run these things', kid."

He didn't wait for a response, getting into his car and rolling down the windows instead of using the air con, deciding to take the scenic route as he backed out of the parking lot and turned onto the right road. In the rear view mirror, the kid stared until he disappeared from view altogether and then McCoy, too used to angry kids ordered into meetings by friends and family and judges, forgot all about him.

Until the following Tuesday, when the kid started off the meeting by standing up ahead of all the regulars and saying, "My name is Jim Kirk – and I need a fucking _drink_."


	2. The Boyfriend and the Best Friend

**Notes: Is it bad that I'm posting this (and, indeed, writing most of this) while quite contentedly draining a bottle of wine? (And before some of you smartasses (Vicky!) get sarky, _yes_, draining it down my own throat.) Regardless of my own drinking habits, enjoy!**

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><p><em>The Boyfriend and the Best Friend<em>

It took another few meetings before Jim would anything more than his brusque introduction in the second. For those few, he would sit as silent and sullen as he had in the first, say nothing to anyone, and leave the moment that the meeting was over. He did not approach McCoy again.

At the fifth meeting, however, he arrived early and chose a seat closer to the first row of the circle, where he had never sat before. He didn't greet anyone, and sat fiddling with what looked like a dog-eared photograph he'd pulled from his wallet.

And when McCoy invited any of the new people to speak, Jim stood up, much to everyone's quite visible surprise.

"Do I have to do the traditional opening?" he asked.

"Nope," McCoy said. "You say whatever you want. Within reason."

"'Kay," he stared down at the picture in his hands again, looking somewhat like a shy kid at school for a second before he said: "I'm Jim. I'm...I'm twenty-six and I'm from Riverside. I, um...let's be traditional. And honest. I've been sober for about three hours. And I'll probably go home and have another drink."

Someone made a sympathetic noise, but Jim didn't look up from his picture.

"I'm here because...because I ran out of rice."

There was a short pause and he chuckled shakily.

"My boyfriend," his head briefly rose to scowl around the circle, "and I don't give a fuck about anyone's bigotry. My _boyfriend_ left me six months ago because of my drinking. We'd been together four years, and he's into Asian food and Indian food and all of that stuff. But then last month, I opened my kitchen cupboard and I was out of rice."

He swallowed hard and peered down at the picture again – McCoy had no doubt that it would be of this boyfriend.

"I wasn't going to come at all, but...I ran out of rice," he reiterated shakily. "Until he left me, I just laughed it off if people said I had a drinking problem. I _drank_, but it was because of the other problems. But then I – he left me, and...and I'm sorry, I can't do this," he suddenly choked out in a rush, and turned and near-ran for the exit.

"Sandra, could you...?" McCoy muttered to his assistant. She was actually just the longest-term regular, but had long ago taken over when McCoy had to step out.

He followed Jim out of the hall and found him sitting on the steps outside, head in one hand and taking long, shaking breaths. He wasn't surprised to see tears glistening on the man's face in the dying light, but didn't comment as he sank down next to him on the steps.

"Really could use a drink right now," Jim muttered hoarsely.

"On the rocks," McCoy said, and snorted. "Yeah, you'll get that. But you know what? That was damn brave of you. Takes some people eight or nine weeks before they'll even introduce themselves, never mind start going into their shit."

"And run the fuck out?"

"Yep," McCoy said. "I've got eleven regulars at the minute – people who've been with the group six months or more – and only one of them never ran out. And you know why Sandra hasn't? 'Cause she was at another AA group before she moved to Kalona. Every single one of 'em has had to step out. No shame in that."

Jim said nothing, heel of his hand pressed into his forehead and eyes closed against the tears.

"May I?" McCoy asked, touching his fingers lightly to the edge of the photograph, and Jim handed it over wordlessly.

It was a messy snapshot probably taken by a friend, of two young men sitting on the hood of an open-top old car in a non-descript driveway in the height of summer. One of the men was Jim, looking a couple of years younger, clean-shaven, wearing jeans and nothing else, and grinning like he'd just won the lottery and gotten married in the same move. He had obviously caught sight of the photographer and last-minute leaned over to beam and sling an arm around the young man sat beside him.

The boyfriend, then, was a man around Jim's age with a solemn expression betrayed by the raised eyebrow he was giving the photographer. He had not succumbed to the summer heat, his lean body concealed in black slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, an open book abandoned in his lap, and he appeared to be impeccably neat despite the shirtless Iowan plastered to his side. And yet, despite the dry expression and the lack of any smile, he didn't look remotely _displeased_ to have said Iowan all over him.

"Not one for stripping off in the summer, huh?"

Jim chuckled wetly. "No. He was brought up in Tokyo. It's worse out there."

"Bet you wouldn't-a minded if he _had _decided to strip off, though?" McCoy guessed, and Jim grinned weakly.

"No, but he never did. Not in public," he said. "He had..." he gestured vaguely at his own arms. "He had...scars."

"Ah," McCoy said.

"And he worked in an office. Deacon and Oppenheimer, that law firm? They had a branch in Iowa City and he worked there. Wore a suit all the time. He'd even drive home in it; he got stopped twice because the cops thought he had to have heatstroke or something."

"He lived with you, then? In Riverside?"

"Yeah," Jim nodded. "He moved in with me after eighteen months. I proposed it to him like you do a wedding. Had a ring and everything – a keyring, anyway. I..." he let out a strange hiccup. "I said it was a test-drive. Said that if I hadn't killed him in another eighteen months, I'd propose to him for real."

"I'm guessing you didn't?"

"No," Jim said quietly. "I...by the time we got to that part, we'd been arguing a lot. There were...issues. And then I lost my job and I...I started drinking more, and then...shit happened. Just...shit happened."

"Okay," McCoy shrugged easily. "And then six months ago he left?"

"Yeah," Jim nodded. "We fought and he walked out. Didn't even take anything with him. Just...walked right out the door and vanished out of my life. I reported him missing and everything. It was the middle of fucking _winter_, and I was terrified they were going to find a body in the river or something. Then his Mom called me and said he was safe and not to bother trying to get in touch again. I haven't heard from him since he left."

"Nice Mom."

"Huh?" Jim looked up from the steps and McCoy snorted.

"I got one up on you, kid – I was _married_. I was married with a kid when it all crashed. My former mother-in-law rang me up and said if she ever saw my sorry ass in Georgia again, she'd skin me alive and leave me out for the wildlife. Alive. And I know my mother-in-law, Jim. I ain't been back to Georgia since."

"Christ," Jim said, momentarily distracted, then frowned. "Well, I don't think I'm welcome in Japan."

McCoy snorted with laughter. "At least Iowa's okay with you."

"Some of it."

"You ready to come back in?"

Jim nodded, scrubbing at the last of the tears, and accepted the hand McCoy offered him. "Hey," he said. "Thanks. That helped."

"That's what I'm here for. Sometimes it helps to remember the part before your problem fucked things up."

"Do you?"

McCoy chuckled. "Oh yeah. I still have crappy art tacked to my fridge door, and the so-called artist is ten years old now and somewhat _less _crap at it. But when she was four and waking me up to show me, I still had that perfect life. So I kept what I could."

Jim smoothed his fingers over the photograph and shook his head.

"I just...I want to clean up and...and get myself back together and then find him and tell him that I'm sorry. I don't even want to get him back because he'd be so fucking stupid to take me back and he's _anything _but stupid, but...I want him to know I'm sorry, you know?"

"Well," McCoy squeezed his shoulder. "This is as good a place as any to start."

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><p>After the meeting, Jim sat astride his motorbike and pulled out his phone. He suddenly didn't feel like finding a bar, or going home to that lonely, empty house and cracking open a beer from the fridge, and his first instinct was to call Sulu and arrange something else.<p>

The phone rang twice before Sulu picked up; the man was too lazy to cross a room to get it, so his flat was absolutely _covered _in them, and his cell never left his person.

"Hey."

"It's Jim."

A rustle – probably Sulu sitting up from whatever spine-tormenting slouch he'd been in. "Hey, Jim. You okay?"

"Yeah. I think. I've been at a meeting."

"That AA-that-isn't-the-AA thing?"

"Yeah."

"How'd it go?"

"Burst into fucking tears."

"Oh. Well..."

"I don't want to go home, Sulu. I don't want to just go get fucked and pretend I've not..." he felt his throat closing. "Can I come over and watch baseball highlights with you?"

Sulu snorted. "Fuck off, Kirk. No baseball in this flat. No way, no how. But you can come and watch stupid shit with me. Syfy is outdoing itself this week."

"Don't lie, it's your favourite channel," Jim managed a half-hearted grin. "I'll be there in half an hour. Should I bring anything?"

"Just your sexy ass, so I can get to it before Janice does."

"She'll kill you."

"And only because I got there first, I'll have you know. See you in thirty, you flaming queer."

"Thirty. Faggot."

Sulu had worked with Jim for three years at a garage in Kalona itself before Jim had been fired. Sulu had walked out a couple of months later and started his own driving school – which, considering the man drove like a complete nutjob, possibly wasn't the best idea he'd ever had. But they'd been buddies, and Jim hadn't said a word.

Sulu had been the one to encourage Jim to ask out the hot intern at the lawyer's office. He had known the both of them well by the end of it, but had always really been _Jim's _friend. He was Jim's kind of guy – into cars, sports and secret dorkgasms over old science fiction that neither of them would wholly admit to even if all their friends and family knew they did it. They had bonded to the point that Sulu had been dumped twice on accusations of being a closeted homosexual.

(Actually, Jim wasn't totally convinced that Sulu _didn't _have some gay-as-fuck tendencies, but apparently his obsession with boobs outdid any gaity in the rest of his universe.)

And when Jim's life had come crashing down, Sulu had been there, and hadn't left until Jim had stopped trying to drink himself to death. Jim owed him. Jim owed him more than almost anyone on the planet, and yet whenever he tried to be all girly and crap and actually _tell _Sulu that he was important to Jim, he would get laughed at and the topic would be thrown away again.

It was Sulu that had pushed Jim to the AA. Hell, Sulu had been the only one, in the end, who could have made the suggestion without getting a mouthful of abuse for it. Or worse.

And so it could only have been Sulu that Jim could turn to, and wouldn't judge him for...well. Anything.


	3. 15th March 2006

**Notes: Interlude chapter! This is an interlude showing some of Jim and Spock's relationship as it was. These interludes will happen every two 'normal' chapters. Remember to pay some vague attention to the dates!**

**Warning: explicit sexual content.**

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><p><em>15th March 2006<em>

"You are drunk."

Like he said _anything_, Spock's tone of voice was completely flat and matter-of-fact, but Jim wasn't so wasted he couldn't see the amusement in the slight crease at the corner of his mouth.

"Mm," Jim agreed, weaving slightly at Spock lead him out of the bar. "Just a bit. But _Spock_. They won!"

"They did," Spock agreed placidly.

"_Fuck _yeah," Jim grinned, and his hand landed unerringly on Spock's ass. "I'm not fit to drive."

"No."

"Can I crash at your place?" Jim asked, snaking his hand up under Spock's shirt. Or trying to. It was his work shirt, and still tucked in. "Damn. Can I?"

Spock was flushing, and it was ridiculously hot. "You may…spend the night at my apartment, if you wish."

"Mhmm. Definitely. Is it far?"

"No. You may _not_…" Spock didn't bother to finish the sentence, choosing instead to remove Jim's wandering hand.

The walk from the bar to Spock's apartment was all of five minutes, even with Jim's unsteady stagger. He was drunk enough to be unsure of his footing, but not so drunk as to be incoherent or lacking in (most) of his mental faculties. Unfortunately, Jim Kirk's mental faculties were almost all honed, at the moment, in trying to get his hands under Spock's shirt.

As such, when Spock let them into his apartment, Jim was quite aware that they were now in a private place, and promptly invaded what little remained of Spock's personal space. The door was barely closed before he was pressing Spock up against it, silencing him with a long, decidedly not chaste kiss and working his hands under that shirt and rubbing up his chest with both hands, swallowing the low moan that his actions produced.

"Fuck, I've been wanting to do this all day," Jim groaned, his voice a low growl in the bottom of his throat, before he pressed impossibly closer and set about trying to suck Spock's tongue clear out of his skull. He had one thumb rubbing endlessly over Spock's left nipple, scraping it with the nail occasionally just to feel him shiver, and the other hand toying with the fastening of Spock's pants, _that _thumb occasionally dipping below the waistband.

"Jim…"

He slotted one leg between Spock's, grinding his arousal into the man's hip and dropping his head to suck a deep bruise through his shirt into his shoulder. The cotton tang was unpleasant and he fumbled with the buttons. "Off. Get this off. _Heh_. Get _it_ off. I'ma get _you_ off."

He stripped off his jacket and t-shirt as Spock shucked his shirt to the floor, and administered a proper bruise to the other shoulder for symmetry. Spock arched into the sting with a faint groan, and Jim grinned around it, wrapping both hands around to grope at his ass (and what a nice ass it was, even covered by the lower half of a boring suit). Spock groaned as they ground together, but Jim, drunk as he was, couldn't miss the way he stiffened when Jim pressed his fingers deeper.

"Jim, I…I have not…"

"Not done that before?" Jim guessed, retracting his hands to Spock's waist and trailing biting kisses down his shoulder. "Okay."

He fumbled with one hand to open his own jeans almost casually before going back to the fastening of Spock's. When Spock's hands came down to stop him, he made a low croon in his throat and pressed in to kiss him again, rolling their hips together until Spock groaned around his tongue.

"S'okay," he mumbled. "Won't fuck – not yet. Too drunk, so it won't be good for you, and I wanna make it good for you, Spock…"

Spock's hands returned to Jim's shoulders, pulling him into another fierce kiss as Jim finally undid his pants and pushed them down over Spock's thighs, wasting no time in getting a hand down Spock's boxers and wrapping it firmly around the impressive hard on that awaited. Spock gasped (and Jim swallowed that noise too) and his hips jerked forward reflexively.

"Fuck yeah," Jim groaned, rubbing up against him as he began to jack Spock with quick, expert pulls. "_Fuck _yeah. That's it; fuck, that's it, moan for me, c'mon Spock…"

He pressed until they ground against each other, the thin fabric of their underwear only adding a dangerous friction, and Jim's hands providing the pressure. His hips were thrusting in earnest now, and he bit down on Spock's earlobe and groaned over the muted gasp.

"So fucking hot, can't get enough of you, had me hard all evening, gonna stay the night and suck you off in the morning and listen to you moan – fuck yeah, just like that, just like that, c'mon, do it again, moan for me, c'mon…"

"_Jim_…" Spock breathed, his eyes glazed and his head lolling back against the door, then he gasped and seized up, hands clutching into Jim's shoulders as he came, hips stuttering into Jim's hands.

"Fuck!" and Jim followed, grinding them desperately together to milk the last vestiges of a messy orgasm from both of them, before he laughed, delighted, and seized Spock's mouth again in a hungry kiss. "Fuck," he moaned into the seams of his lips. "Fuck, that was good. You good?"

"Y…yes," Spock breathed, chest heaving, and Jim grinned at him.

"I like your fucked out look," he said, wiping his hands off on Spock's soiled boxers and ignoring the vaguely indignant look. "S'a hot look. C'mon. I can suck you off in the shower."

"You are still drunk," Spock murmured around the following kiss, tasting cheap beer and the slight tang of peanuts.

"More on you than the beer," Jim returned, cupping Spock through his boxers and squeezing lightly. "C'mon. Shower, then let's crash in your bed and I'll suck your brains out through your dick. _Fuck_. Maybe twice."


	4. The Drinking Game

**Notes: Rapid update in thanks for rapid feedback. Aw yeah. Also, I'm nearly done actually writing this montrosity so I should be able to maintain fairly regular, quick updates.**

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><p><em>The Drinking Game<em>

"You have to help me," Jim said, the moment Sulu opened the front door.

Sulu lived in a shared house on the outskirts of Riverside, renting a room from an elderly woman everybody called Nana, and who (of course) had no actual grandchildren. He called it a flat, but it was really a bedroom with an ensuite and nothing more. Jim had never met the other three renters in the house, but at least one of them (judging by the washing line out back) had a fetish for tiny pink socks.

"Er," Sulu said, "okay. Does it involve bodies, any kind of bag larger than Janice's handbags, or alibis?"

"No," Jim said, following him inside and up the stairs.

"Then I'll be happy to help. What is it?" Sulu asked as he kicked the door shut behind them and watched Jim sit down on the edge of the bed. "You okay, dude? You seem tense."

"I am tense," Jim said. "I haven't had a drink since five o'clock this afternoon. And that's my point. I want to stop drinking."

Sulu stared at him for a long, silent minute, before dragging over the armchair and sitting opposite him. "You want to stop? As in, for good? Quit booze for good?"

"Yes."

His face broke out into a wide grin, and he leaned forward to hug Jim tightly. "Thank fuck. Jesus _Christ_, Jim, you have no idea how long I've waited for you to say that."

Jim hugged him back, hard, before letting go and running a hand through his hair. "I want to quit drinking. Properly. Never touch it again."

"The AA meeting?"

Jim shrugged. "Kind of. Like. No but. Yeah."

"That made a whole load of sense."

"Shut up. I just got talking, you know? About...about what happened. And the guy who runs it – McCoy – he's divorced and has a kid and he'll not drunk for _years_, and...he sorted himself out. I mean, he got _divorced _and he's moved _state _– I think he's from like Alabama or Georgia or something, I can't remember – but he's sorted himself out, and..."

"...Jim?"

"I don't have a hope in hell of getting him back if I don't sort myself out," Jim croaked.

Sulu leaned forward just enough to plant his hands on Jim's forearms. "So we'll sort you out. First thing tomorrow, at the ass-crack of dawn when even _you _can't drink, we'll clear your place of booze. Completely."

"'Kay."

"You should ask that McCoy guy about getting a mentor or something too because I love you, Jim, but I don't think I'm quite qualified to deal with you detoxing."

"I won't _detox_, I don't drink _that _much."

"Yeah, Jim, you do. It's not all about sweating your guts out and pukin' like you're coming down off heroin. You're going to be _cranky_. You might want to think about replacing drinking with smoking, but that's not _much _better."

"No. I'm sorting it out _properly_."

"And I'll tell Janice."

"Oh _fuck _no, Sulu!"

"Fuck yes. You'll be too scared to drink."

Damn right he would be. Janice was Sulu's current girlfriend – a not-very-tall, 'interestingly' hairstyled woman of excellent cooking skills, an even more wonderful backside, and about as much give as a nurse. She was scariest woman Jim had ever met. If she and Sulu ever got hitched and had kids, there would be no prizes for guessing who'd be the disciplinarian in _that _house.

"You have a point."

"I know," Sulu said, and rolled his eyes. "Hey, stay here tonight. There's no booze around so you can get started on your 'one day sober' recitations."

Jim eyed the bed he sat on, and looked back at Sulu pointedly. "Dude..."

"Oh come on, it's not gay. We'll be wearing our underwear."

"_I_ will. _You _sleep naked."

"The fact you even know that is remarkably gay."

Jim managed to laugh, genuinely _laugh_, for the first time that evening, and the heavy shadows of the meeting began to dissipate. "I just know _you_."

"Well, you can't get any gayer. I'm the one with a manly reputation at stake, and I'm offering. Stay here."

"Okay, but as your friend, I feel the need to tell you that you don't _have _a manly reputation."

"Fuck you."

"No thanks. Janice'd kill me. Painfully. With her hairpins. In the crotch."

"Yeah, thanks, Jim, now shut up."

* * *

><p>Jim's good mood didn't last.<p>

On Wednesday morning, they had gone round to Jim's and _emptied _the place of booze. And you never know how much of something you have until you try throwing it away.

Jim hadn't even been aware there _was _that much alcohol in his house. Okay, the boxes of beer cans in the basement – but everyone had those. Just like everybody had cases of beer in the garage – it kept them cool, and they were just a stockpile, if he threw a party or something. Never mind that he never had. And there was the pantry cupboard full of wine, but those were Spock's…even if he hadn't bought any wine for the last, like, _year _of their relationship. And maybe there was a line-up of Budweiser in the fridge door, but they were just so there was a cold one ready after a hard day at work.

Oh shit, if he was going to do this, there'd be no cold one after work. Ever.

But he bore that with gritted teeth: if he was going to give up, which he _was _because otherwise he would _never _get that happiness back he'd had before, then it would just be insane to have temptation sitting in his own house – fuck, _all over _his own house. He helped. He poured it down the sink, and didn't stash any of it, and fuck, okay, so he felt kind of proud of himself when Sulu turned round and said he was pretty sure the place was empty.

But still…

It wasn't _too _bad. It was okay. It _was_. He went to work that morning and ground his teeth through a whole day with the assistant manager, 'that's _Mister _Fitzpatrick to you, Kirk', who was living proof that there was a God, and He was every bit the dick He'd been in the Old Testament for exposing the poor, (mostly) innocent, (mostly) Christian population of Iowa to this dickwad.

Jim hated shifts with Fitzpatrick. He was incompetent, stuck-up and full of himself. He was an out-of-towner and full of 'expanding the business' and 'fulfilling our potential' and 'widening the core support base.' Considering that said support base was, oh, _the population of Riverside because it was the only decently large store in the town_, then Jim didn't know how he expected to widen that base. Sabotage the contraceptives?

It was probably made worse by the simple fact that his usual boss, Mr. Barnett, was a perfectly boring and ordinary manager. He was too busy yelling at suppliers and trying to shave down their expenses to micromanage the staff, and so shelf-stackers like Jim were very much left to their own devices. Which suited Jim just fine. He liked being left alone to work instead of having to kiss ass to 'team leaders' and all of that crap. That's why he'd loved his job as a mechanic so much.

So Wednesday had kind of sucked, and then he'd gone home to find all the booze gone. And when he'd had a bad day at work, you know, a cold one in front of the baseball was just the thing a guy needed. He'd _always _done that. Come home, crack open a cold one, and back when his life wasn't _shit_, get scolded by Spock when he came home for having his feet up on the coffee table.

Only there was no Spock, which defeated the point of putting his feet on the coffee table because he'd only ever done it because Spock would _look _at him and be _so obviously _trying to be cross but would just end up batting them off the table himself and kissing Jim instead. So there was no Spock, and no feet on the coffee table, and now there was no beer.

He toughed it out. And shit, he'd thought he knew the meaning of toughing it out when your balls got scrunched in your jeans in mixed company. That had nothing on this. He wanted nothing more than to go round the store, get a beer – just _one _beer – and settle down to watch the baseball and forget about his shitty day. Just one.

Only Jim had to admit even to himself, it had never been just one. It would be six or seven, at least, before he even thought about making dinner. And then, sometimes, because the kitchen was the loneliest part of the house without Spock there, making some weird Asian cuisine with the wok, he would just skip the food and have another three or four beers before going to bed.

It wasn't ever really just one.

But he toughed it out. He put on the sports channel, didn't watch it, and spent the evening with a photo album on his lap instead, going through all their old pictures. Sulu was a complete camera whore, and on their first anniversary, had presented them with an album of photographs. He'd kept up the tradition, even on their fourth anniversary when they'd barely been speaking to each other. When Spock had left, Jim had clung to those albums and found himself ridiculously grateful that _someone _had taken all the pictures – and the time to pass them over to him.

"Someday," he said to a graduation photo of Spock, before Jim had met him, that he suspected had been donated to the album by Spock's parents, "I'll be able to tell you I'm sorry and you won't hate me anymore."

He went to bed without a drink on Wednesday.

Thursday was a little easier. Barnett was at work, and Sulu swung by with offers of a gay boys' night in (much to the amusement of Jim's giggling co-workers) and Sulu had a way of keeping Jim too busy and too distracted to even think about the longing in his gut. They argued over sports, and finally settled on mocking the meatheads that played American football, and then Janice showed up with takeout at around nine and bitched about her own co-workers. Janice was a teacher, and while she was a somewhat fierce disciplinarian, she adored children and they seemed, on the whole, to return the sentiment. Her co-workers, however, were quite clearly Satan's messengers on Earth, if Janice were to be believed, and she kept Jim distracted until midnight with descriptions of the new (and horrific) school nurse until they got into a pissing contest about their jobs while Sulu laughed at them both and called them mugs for not becoming driving instructors in his tiny company.

Jim didn't even realise until Friday morning that he'd spent Thursday sober.

Friday was his day off, in exchange for working Saturday, and Jim usually spent it drinking and doing household chores. But that went out the window when he retrieved his mail from the mat and found a piece of junk mail for Spock.

_Mr. Spock Grayson_.

It was the same piece of junk – some catalogue that Spock had bought a replacement suit from and never used again – and it came every month, without fail, with new boasts of price cuts and quality and _seven day delivery for all residents in Iowa! _– only it came with Spock's _name _on it, and…

Jim tore it up, drove to the store, and bought four six packs of the shittiest beer money could buy this side of the state border.

* * *

><p>To say that McCoy was surprised when Jim immediately stood up to share his week on Tuesday night was an understatement, but he very carefully didn't let it show. If the guy was willing to start exposing his thoughts on his situation to the group, then it could only be a good sign.<p>

"I didn't go home and have a drink after last week's meeting," Jim said, earning himself a smile from Sandra. "I didn't drink on Wednesday or Thursday, but on Friday, a piece of junk mail came for my boyfriend, and I…I just went right out and worked my way through, like, ten cans."

He was fiddling with his photograph again. It seemed to be a nervous habit.

"I mean…I could deal with throwing all the booze out of my house. And I could deal with my shitty boss. And I could deal with…with the empty kitchen and the fuckin' _quiet_, but…one piece of junk mail and I couldn't handle it."

One of the younger women – a blonde called Christine who'd turned to drink after her fiancé had died – leaned forward to pat his hand sympathetically and he shot her a small smile.

"How long since you last had a drink, Jim?" McCoy asked.

"Last night. About…nine-ish."

"Twenty-two hours," McCoy said, glancing at his watch. "Let's make it twenty-four, huh? Always gotta start with one day sober."

Jim waited to speak with him again after the meeting. He was beginning to look at least more comfortable in doing so, and they fell into step as they walked out of the building and down the steps to the parking lot.

"I want to stop," Jim blurted out.

"That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Jim shrugged. "It's not enough, though. I mean…fucking _junk _mail…"

"You want spectacular slip-up?"

"Go on."

"I'd been sober a whole month, and this kid brought his friend into A&E with a broken leg. Hockey accident. Run of the mill, kid wasn't in any danger, just a lot of pain and a lot of morphine."

"'Kay…"

"Once we'd got him hopped up on drugs and the leg set, he told the friend who'd brought him in that he scored the goal, and the kid goes 'I don't think so, buddy.' Buddy. Suddenly, all I could think about was getting a Budweiser."

"…Seriously?"

"Yep. Went out after work and got about eight of 'em. Never drank them before – or since. Stuff's vile."

Jim snorted with laughter. "Wow."

"The smallest things are gonna set you off sometimes, Jim. Junk mail and rice aren't the weirdest I've heard."

"So how the hell do I stop? If everything's going to remind me…"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On why you're drinking."

There was a short silence, in which Jim stared at the concrete parking lot ground, and McCoy stared at the top of Jim's bent head.

"I don't know you, Jim, but the first thing you talked about was this boyfriend of yours. And I think a lot of your drinking is wrapped up in him."

"I drank before he left me, doctor."

"Why'd you drink then?"

Jim hesitated, and shrugged awkwardly. "I don't know…just…did? I mean…I got fired from my job, but…"

"Because you were drinking too much?"

Jim's head snapped up, and McCoy snorted.

"I've been in this business too long, Jim. You can't bullshit me. You're hardly the first man it's happened to. You get fired because you're drinking, so your problems get worse, so you drink more, so your significant other gets sick of it and walks, so your problems get worse, so you drink more…"

"Okay. Okay, I get the picture."

"When'd you start drinking?"

Jim shrugged. "Fifteen, I guess. About then."

"Your father drink?"

"I don't know. My stepfather did. And my mom, and my brother…"

"Okay, so it was normal. Drink round the dinner table, I'm guessing? You go out with your buddies and drink too?"

"Sometimes," Jim bristled. "That doesn't make me fucked up!"

"No, it doesn't," McCoy agreed. "That's normal. Hell, that's even healthy in moderation. I'm not a born-again nutjob, Jim. If you're not an alcoholic, a couple of drinks won't hurt. But it wasn't always a couple of drinks, was it?"

"…No."

"_Siddown_," he drawled, parking himself on the stone steps. The sun was still hovering just above the horizon. "When did you meet your boyfriend? And what was his name?"

"Spock."

"_Spock_?"

"Yeah, I know," Jim smiled faintly. "Just before Christmas, four and a half years ago now. December fifth. That was our anniversary."

"What did you do?"

"For a living? Mechanic. Fixed up cars."

"And let me guess, hard day at work and you'd come home for a beer."

Jim shrugged. "Sure."

"Two if you were stressed?"

"…I think I see where you're going with this."

"Is that a yes?"

"…Yeah."

"When was the first time you fought with him? With Spock?"

Jim blew out a breath noisily. "_Shit_, I don't know. Like, a proper fight instead of the usual 'do your own damn laundry' shit."

"Okay, yeah, shoulda clarified that. Proper fight, not the usual spats."

"Um. Maybe…okay, it would have been the summer after we got together. He got promoted and it meant longer hours, and we had a row about it."

"And what did you do?"

"…I went out and got pissed."

"You see where I'm going with this?"

"Yeah."

"You drink when you're stressed and unhappy. Common problem; that's why I became an alcoholic. Just like you, Jim. Before my marriage broke up, I didn't have a drinking problem. I had a drink, but it wasn't a problem."

Jim scrubbed both hands through his hair. "So…what? I can't just get rid of all the stress in my life."

"Nope. But you can cope with it without having a drink," McCoy said. "Most people won't recommend you this one, Jim, but I will: find something else. Find something else to do when life gets the better of you. Kevin in there – kid that desperately needs a belt before his pants fall down? He fell off the wagon almost every damn day – until he took up running. Now he goes running twice, three times a day, and he's been sober for months. He found some other way to handle it."

"I don't _run_," Jim said, curling his lip.

"Do whatever. Find some other de-stressing technique. That's your challenge. You've gotta break the idea that drinking's a way to make a bad day better – I think you've probably noticed by now that it doesn't."

"You make it sound too fucking easy."

"It's not easy. You're a grown man with a habit that's become a compulsion. That's damn hard to break, kid, but it's not impossible."

Jim snorted, glancing down at the picture he still held. It was a wonder he hadn't rubbed the image clean off the page.

"You want to take the first step?"

"…Okay."

"Traditional opening, then?"

Jim glanced up at him. For a long moment, they simply stared at each other, before Jim licked his dry lips and muttered: "My name is Jim Kirk, and…and I'm…" he took a deep breath, and blurted out: "And I'm an alcoholic."


	5. Woman's Work

**Notes: I'm feeling cheery today. Everyone crack open a beer and enjoy whatever weather it is that you have. **

* * *

><p><em>Woman's Work<em>

A distraction was not too difficult to find in the short term.

Jim had never really been house-proud. As long as he had a roof over his head and food (and beer) in the fridge, then he'd been happy. Spock had always been the one to cook and clean and fix things up – not because Jim was bad at it, but more because Jim was too lazy to do it, nine times out of ten, and why do it yourself when you had a boyfriend willing to do it for you?

(Kind of like masturbation, then.)

But in the six months since Spock had walked out, Jim hadn't really picked up any of the chores beyond the bare minimum – in fact, he was pretty sure that the bedsheets hadn't been changed in those six months.

He just hadn't _cared _enough to do it.

Wednesday and Thursday, he kept himself distracted with work and going around to Sulu's afterwards, struggling to keep his mind off the easy route. Because it _was_. It was just easier to have a few and fall asleep buzzed and too drunk to notice how damn _quiet _it was. It was just easier that way.

But somewhere along the line – and he honestly didn't know when – Sulu had stopped keeping booze at his flat, and so if Jim went round there straight after work, he wouldn't be able to get hold of any. And for all of his easy-going, don't-give-a-shit-as-long-as-I-have-a-fast-car-and-a-video-game charm, Sulu was no pushover.

Thursday night he did spend in his own house, and went through three hot showers and a disastrous attempt at baking in order to keep his mind off the empty places in the fridge where the beer bottles were supposed to be. His skin _crawled _with the need to drink – he almost itched. He could feel the deprivation humming under his skin, like bees wanting out.

He went to bed and stared at the ceiling for three hours, mentally running through every single thing he'd fucked up with Spock, until he drifted off in exhaustion at three in the morning, desperate for a drink only to find the nightmare of their last Christmas together.

He woke up in tears, and couldn't remember why.

On Friday morning, he cleaned himself up, tried to look presentable – and called up Janice to ask her to come and help him clean. He figured if the terrifying Janice was around, he'd need way more balls that he had to get a drink or six from the store.

"You want me to come and help you _clean_?" she squawked down the line at him.

"Er, yeah."

"_Clean_?"

"Yeah."

"Wait-wait-wait. You. _Jim Kirk_. _You_, are cleaning? You, the man who grows _mould _in his coffee mugs _for fun_? _You_?"

"_Yes_. And I don't! That was one time!"

"Which is twice too many, if you ask me. Jim, I'm _afraid _to step in your house. I might catch something!"

"Janice, bacteria aren't stupid enough to tangle with you."

"Point. I'll bring supplies."

"_Supplies_?"

Turned out cleaning was a way bigger thing than Jim had expected, because she turned up ten minutes later (and it took thirty minutes to get from Janice's house to Jim's house, so he was suspicious) with _supplies_. Gloves, sponges, bleaches, window-cleaner, de-greasers, oven cleaner, wire brushes, wire _sponges_ (they even made those?), rags and clothes that looked like they'd seen better centuries, teatowels (the hell? Jim wasn't _that _slovenly!), dusters, bags for the vacuum cleaner (and how Janice knew what kind of vacuum cleaner Jim had, he didn't want to know) and enough kitchen roll to account for roughly half of the South American rainforest deforestation.

"Don't you look at me like that," Janice said. "I'll see the hole you live in. I brought light bulbs too. You can start by actually _replacing _the broken ones."

Okay, fair point.

Cleaning was far harder work than Jim had supposed. He had never really paid much attention to how much he'd let the house slide, and just the stripping of the sheets from the double bed, and the two guest bedrooms, _and _the futon in the study that was permanently a bed due to being broken, was enough to tire him.

The rainstorms had passed overnight, and so by the early afternoon, the washing line was dominated with bedsheets, and the dryer in the basement was churning over all the old towels that had gathered in the bottom of hamper since…well, probably six months.

"You're a disgusting human being, and a _man _to boot," Janice told him when he emptied them into the washing machine, and had swatted him with a duster when he'd dared to stick his tongue out.

Janice had gone through the whole place opening all the windows, 'to air the place out' (like it didn't _already _have air in it. Pft) before starting in the kitchen with her army of cleaning products. (At one point, Jim walked in to get a view of her halfway into the oven, scrubbing it with de-greaser, and that wonderful backside on impressive show. He'd taken a photo on his cell and sent it to Sulu, only to receive a long text of what was probably Japanese abuse in return.) By the time Jim had changed all the sheets, put the towels through the washer and dryer, and changed all the broken light bulbs for new ones, she had even purged his fridge of old food.

"Jim, _this_," she said, waving a jar of apricot jam at him, "is vile. Do you know what the date on this thing is?"

"No?"

"Nineteen seventy two!"

Jim winced. "Um…"

"I should just burn this place," she muttered, throwing it into the trash. "Take that out. Your garbage man is going to have a field day with you."

"Or think someone's bought the place off me," Jim muttered.

Janice tortured his kitchen to within an inch of its life and took to ordering Jim around like a drill sergeant. He was sent through the rest of the house with a box for all the useless paper lying around – newspapers, flyers, bills – that he'd just left lying around all over the place. The living room was the worst, for obvious reasons, followed closely by the comics he'd left in the downstairs bathroom after every crap for the last six months. He left a small tree out for the recycling, and rather than being allowed to rest, was sent to strip the cushion covers off every cushion in the house and run them through the wash as well.

"Dust is _dirt_, Kirk!" she shouted at him from the inside of the oven when he dared to protest.

When she made a move on washing every pan and utensil that he owned, he stole a cloth and a bottle of window cleaner and went to clean the back door. The living room had a glass door that opened into the yard, and he took the opportunity to stand in a pool of sun and clean the window from the outside – which, judging by the bird crap, hadn't been done in far too long. He didn't even have bird feeders or anything.

The garden was large and overgrown. Spock had had plans for it, but had never gotten around to it, too busy with work and Jim to pay much attention to it. The lawn was a pathetic mess of dying grass, and the fence haphazard and falling to pieces. It was a wonder that Jim's neighbours hadn't tried to storm them and invade Kirk territory yet – or at least that their ten grandchildren hadn't.

Perhaps when he was done with the house, Jim would get to work on the garden. Maybe that would keep him distracted as well.

Sulu showed up after work, at around four, with boxes of pizza and obscenely large bottles of Pepsi. Janice wouldn't let them eat until they brought the washing in ("She'll make a good mother to your little scary half-ninja babies.") and then they sat around in Jim's bombsite of a living room with cheese dripping from their fingers and ribbing Sulu about his day.

It was…

Jim hadn't really had the two of them over since Spock had left – or anyone, really. Or for a while before. Home was for him and Spock to be…well, him and Spock, without outside interference. When things had started to go downhill, Jim had gotten jealous of _anyone _who got Spock's attention, and pretty soon, nobody was welcome. Even Sulu and Janice hadn't really been welcome in the last few months – and Jim was struck with how much he'd missed it.

He had missed _this_. He had missed just eating pizza and bugging a friend. He had missed the easy companionship and the in-jokes that had never really gone away. He had missed not being _lonely_.

"I'll come round Sunday," Janice said firmly when he showed them out, "and so help me, Jim, if you make _more _of a mess between now and Sunday, I'll string you up! Don't think I won't!"

She stalked off to her car, and Sulu hung back for a moment to pull Jim into a fierce hug.

"I've missed you," he said cryptically.

"What? I'm right here."

"Yeah, _now_. But you haven't been – not for a while. I've missed _you_."

Jim bit the inside of his cheek and conjured up a smirk. "Can we not have a big gay moment in front of your girlfriend?"

"Good idea. I'll be round Sunday too. Keep safe."

"Cheers, man."

Even though they had gone – and Janice had taken her cleaning supplies with her – Jim wrestled the vacuum cleaner out of the downstairs closet and did a round of the downstairs, in preparation for the dusty havoc Janice would undoubtedly wreak when she returned on Sunday. He finally, after owning the damn thing for seven years, worked out what the final attachment was for (getting rid of ceiling cobwebs) and how to clean the stairs without falling and breaking his neck – last time he'd tried, Spock had watched his ill-fated attempts without _quite _laughing, but it was a near thing.

They'd had stair sex to celebrate their cleanliness. Which had kind of ruined the point of cleaning them in the first place. But they hadn't cared; they'd been brand new then, and hadn't cared much about anything but getting off anywhere they could. Well, that was Jim's goal. Spock hadn't been so fussed about the 'anywhere' part – just the getting off part.

Jim sat on the step in question for a good hour, rubbing the carpet under his socked heels, and wondering if it was his memory that blocked out how utterly uncomfortable that must have been. Stair sex? Really?

When he woke up on Saturday morning, wrapped in crisp sheets that _almost _didn't feel like his, he realised that he had, almost without noticing, gone four days without a drink.


	6. 3rd July 2006

**Notes: The second interlude for you all. If you're good, I might double-post today.**

* * *

><p><em>3rd July 2006<em>

Jim grinned at the surprised expression on Spock's face when he opened the door, and surged forward for a kiss.

"Hey," he mumbled into Spock's mouth, and kicked his bag inside before swinging the apartment door closed.

"Jim," Spock untangled himself. "You have to be in Omaha tomorrow afternoon. You should be packing."

"Packed," Jim shrugged, nudging the bag with his foot. "I'll just go from here in the morning. It's only a four-hour drive, I'll get there in plenty of time – and it's not like Gary'll care if I'm late. Hell, _he'll _be late, and it's _his _wedding, not mine. Anyway, you sounded down on the phone."

"I...what?"

"You did," Jim confirmed, shucking his jacket onto the floor and wrapping his arms around Spock's waist. "You sounded all morose an' shit. You okay?"

"I am...fine."

"Mm," Jim hummed, running both hands firmly up Spock's back and pressing him into Jim's torso. "So, what, this tension is all in my imagination?"

Spock let out a breath that _might _have been a tired chuckle, if he were prone to such things. "Work was simply trying today. It is nothing to be concerned about."

"Aw, but I've got my 'concerned boyfriend' face on," Jim said, tugging aside Spock's shirt collar and pressing a kiss to the exposed skin.

"It is...appreciated, Jim," Spock murmured, his voice dropping as Jim continued to stroke his back.

"Jesus, how trying was _trying_?" Jim muttered, and tugged Spock's shirt free of his pants. "C'mon. Sweatpants and t-shirt. You can't relax in your work clothes, how many times do I have to tell you?"

Jim was nothing if not efficient at sex, and took the opportunity between stripping Spock of the remnants of his work suit and pouring him into the promised sweatpants and t-shirt to give him a blowjob that wrung all the tension out of his back.

"Still with me?" he asked, tugging the sweatpants up over Spock's hips and pushing a kiss into the hinge of his jaw. "Hey," he grinned when Spock regained his breath and blinked slowly at him. "Welcome back, gorgeous. C'mon. I'm feeling gay – let's go sit on the sofa and watch crap soap operas on TV."

A spark of awareness pierced the glaze in Spock's eyes, and he frowned minutely. "Did you spend your lunch hour with Sulu again?"

"How could you tell?" Jim asked cheerfully, dragging Spock back out into the tiny living room and pulling him down onto the couch. Spock lived in a_ box_, not an apartment, and getting two fully grown men onto the couch at the same time required neither of them to be at all bothered by the issues of personal space.

But Jim had worked out his favourite position on said tiny couch, and ended up leaning back against the arm and tugging Spock to settle over him, until the dark head was rested on Jim's collarbone and his body relaxed into the lines of Jim's.

"Feel better?"

"Yes," Spock murmured. Jim couldn't quite see his mouth from that angle, but he could hear the quiet smile, and he could see that his eyes were closed.

"I don't suppose you managed to get the week off?" Jim asked.

"No; Mr. Allen cancelled his booked vacation to deal with the Greaves case, and he has placed a ban on all frivolous vacation days until we have secured an appeal."

"And let me guess, tripping over to Omaha with your boyfriend to watch a jock get hitched is a frivolous use of vacation days?"

"Yes."

"Damn," Jim said lightly. "I was looking forward to hotel sex."

Even without looking, he knew that Spock was flushing. "Mr. Mitchell…is not the kind of man that I…"

"Yeah, I know. You'd be bored stiff, and uncomfortable. Still. I'm gonna miss you."

"It is only until Thursday night."

"Does that mean I can come and crash Thursday night too?" Jim asked. He was pushing his luck now, and he knew it, but he couldn't help asking. Spock's job took up so much of his working week, Jim often got twitchy waiting for the weekend.

"…Perhaps."

Jim grinned into Spock's hair. "Oh, I am totally breaking you down."

"I believe the term is 'a bad influence.'"

"That too," Jim agreed, wrapping his hands around Spock's upper arms and hauling him up. "C'mere."

Spock relaxed quickly into the kissing, shifting to stretch out full-length over Jim's body and pin him there with his deceptive weight. The kisses were lazy and wet, more exploratory than passionate, but more sensual than merely affectionate. Kissing was one of Jim's favourite things in the world, and although he punctuated them with the odd bite to Spock's lower lip, just to feel the long shiver roll down his spine, he didn't bother to try for flames.

"We'll have to go away sometime," he murmured against Spock's mouth. "Go find a hotel and have rampant hotel sex. I'm totally going to screw you in an ensuite."

"There is an ensuite at your house," Spock pointed out.

"Yeah, but that's different," Jim said, and kissed him to prevent any counter-argument from escaping. "Let's go in September. There won't be any kids around. We'll go find somewhere quiet where we can just fuck for like, five days on the go. Like cats in heat."

"You are _always _in heat," Spock murmured as Jim's kisses began to take a more carnal turn, nipping down his neck in a neat line before returning to his mouth. "It is…a perma…permanent state of affairs with you."

"And you love it," Jim said, sliding both hands down to cup Spock's ass through his pants, rolling his hips until Spock's breathing took on a decidedly shaky quality. "C'mon, gorgeous, bedroom. I don't have enough underwear to ruin _another _pair."


	7. What Happens in Omaha

**Notes: So I know I said I might double-update, but I, er, kind of fell asleep in front of the TV. Mea culpa. *pushes chapter across table hopefully* S'okay, yes?**

* * *

><p><em>What Happens in Omaha<em>

"I want to kick start this meeting myself," McCoy said when everyone was settled. "Last night, I went to a convenience store near my apartment in Iowa City and bought a six pack of Stella."

Every face turned to stare at him, most in shock and some in mixed shock and pity. No matter how often he told them that he was in the same boat, they always seemed to surprised to get any evidence of his own issues.

"I've got a little girl. She turned eleven years old yesterday. I sent her a card and a present and I called at noon and got to wish her a happy birthday in person. Which is more than I get most of her birthdays. And she started tellin' me about this boy at school. She's eleven years old, and she's started noticin' boys, and I'm here in Iowa instead of doin' my duty by parking out on the front porch with a shotgun."

He noticed Jim grin and duck his head suddenly. About half the men in the room, old or young, wore similar expressions. And hell, they were right to. It was a man's _duty_, damn it. It was one of the responsibilites of being a father, right up there with teaching your son how to shave and offering to break the kneecaps of the first boy to break your little girl's heart.

And he couldn't do it.

"And suddenly I needed a drink. So I went out and got 'em. Bought a six pack of _shit _that even at my worst, I was too proud to touch. I took it home, cracked one open, and sat there staring at it for maybe an hour. I wanted to drink it. I _really _wanted to drink it. Hell, that's when any father needs a good stiff drink – and more when he realises he's missed that. For me, she's gone from being my little princess who wanted to wear her damn gumboots and ballet dress at the same time, to an eleven-year-old who's got a crush on Johnny Carlisle in her math class."

There was a short silence as he gathered his words, then he sighed.

"I threw it at the wall."

A surprised chuckle went around.

"Landlady's gonna kill me. Threw it at the damn wall. Haven't actually brought myself to clean it up yet, so there's a damn mess. Chucked the rest of the pack down the sink, one at a time. I'll admit to imaginin' they were this Johnny whatever's balls when I crushed the cans into the recycling, but that was it. I got rid of 'em, every last one. Closest I've been in about a year now."

"But you didn't do it," Sandra said, reaching to squeeze his hand sympathetically. "You didn't do it."

"Nope. Got all the way to openin' it, but I didn't do it. Still sober."

He sat down, not bothering to add any more words. They knew what he was trying to tell them – hell, they'd probably known the moment he said he'd bought a drink.

"Well, let's not mope. Who's got a happier week than me, huh?"

To his surprise, Jim rose to his feet, hands jammed in his pockets and looking once more like an overgrown schoolkid. "Um. Me."

"Go on, then, Jim."

"I've…" Jim took a breath. "I had a drink Monday night. It was just the one, though, and I…I called my friend and he came over and we watched some curling programme – seriously, curling. So I only had one. And that was my first drink since _last _Monday night."

A ripple of applause went around the group, and McCoy grinned.

"Well done, Jim. Work on your Mondays and you might be onto a winner. What was it this time? More rice?"

Jim grimaced. "Fuckwit boss."

"I hear ya, honey!" Sandra laughed. It was generally agreed that Sandra's boss would've driven Jesus himself to the bottom of a bottle.

Jim managed a shy smile and collapsed back into his chair gracelessly. By the time Sandra had gone through her week and passed the baton to Christine, he had drawn out that picture again and was stroking it absently while he listened to the other group members. Wasn't looking it, but stroking it all the time, the way some people brought their boyfriends and girlfriends along and held hands. As if he could draw the same support from a picture.

Maybe the kid was going to make it.

* * *

><p>"Jim, c'mere."<p>

Jim stuck his hands back in his pockets and meandered over to McCoy in a wholly unhurried fashion. McCoy imagined that once upon a time, he would have been the type to swagger. Hell, with that lopsided smile and leather jacket, he would have been the type to get in bar brawls just for the way he looked.

"Here," McCoy pressed a thin package into his hands. "It might not help, it might do wonders. Just a thought."

Jim peeled the brown paper away to reveal a plain wall calendar.

"Mark off every day you spend sober. If you drink, leave the day blank and don't start marking again until you spend one sober."

"Does it help?" Jim asked.

McCoy shrugged. "Helps some, not others. If it doesn't, you got a free wall calendar. Try keeping it near your bed – it'll be most effective to remind yourself of how well you're doing each morning."

"Or not."

"Or not," McCoy agreed.

Jim stared at the calendar for a long moment, not really looking at it. "Does it…does it get easier?"

"Most times, yes," McCoy said. "I can go weeks without thinking about it. But every now and then, you realise you're outta rice, and the longing is just as strong. It will always require you to be strong about it, Jim. You can't let your guard down. That's why distraction is the best tactic – if you don't think about it, you don't want it."

Jim's hand shifted in his pocket, and McCoy noticed the edge of the photograph peeking out as he fiddled.

"And you've got an extra strength."

"What?"

"That boyfriend of yours," he said.

"Yeah, well..."

"You've got a goal in mind. And in my experience, that makes you much more likely to be able to beat this."

"Yeah?" a smile tugged at the corners of Jim's lips.

"Yeah. Now I'm going to set you another goal. I want you to come in next week and be able to tell us you haven't touched a drink since last night. Think you can do that?" McCoy asked as they walked out to the parking lot.

Jim shrugged, and smiled again. "I can try."

"That's the spirit. You try for him or for you, it doesn't matter until you can break the habit. Once you've broken it, it does get easier."

"Distraction worked," Jim offered. "I cleaned out my piece of shit house. Haven't really done it since...since he left. He had plans for the garden too, and I'm goin' through the study trying to find them."

"Very housewife."

"Shut up," Jim grumbled, but with no bite. "Hey, are you...are you ever going to try and make things right with your ex?"

"Nah," McCoy said. "No can do, not really. The drinking was the result, not the problem. I'm a doctor first and foremost, Jim. I run these things on the cheap. We're not technically AA here; we just haven't been caught by no lawyer for it."

Jim snickered.

"When I was married, I was on duty in A&E six times a week. Odd hours, _long _hours, never saw my wife or my kid as much as Joss – that's the wife – wanted me to. Eventually, she got tired of being married to an unreliable man, and...well. She found someone else."

"She cheated on you?" Jim had gone faintly grey under his summer tan.

"I don't know about that," McCoy grimaced. "I couldn't have proved that if I'd wanted to. But the moment the divorce had gone through, she'd shacked up with some other guy so, I dunno. Maybe she did."

Jim looked faintly sick.

"You okay, kid?" McCoy caught him under the elbow as he swayed almost drunkenly and sat him down on the steps. "Whoa. Deep breaths, Jim. You're alright. Okay?"

"Sorry," Jim mumbled, face tucked between his knees. McCoy could hear him performing deep, steady breathing exercises.

"Don't worry about it," McCoy said. "You feeling faint?"

"A little bit," Jim mumbled. "I'm sorry. It's just...shit. _Fuck_. _Fuck it_."

"What?"

"I'm your fucking ex-wife," Jim mumbled.

"Sorry, Jim, you're gonna have to spell this one out for me. You may be a pretty-boy, but you sure as shit ain't my ex-wife."

"No, I mean..." Jim sat up properly and took a deep breath. "Okay. About...about eight months after Spock and I started dating, one of my high school buddies got married in Omaha. A bunch of us went over and I booked a hotel room – but just for me. I mean, Gary was a great guy and all but you wouldn't bring your boyfriend to his wedding, know what I mean? Hell, I don't even think he knew I was pitching for the wrong team. And Spock was busy with work and didn't want to go to a jock's wedding anyway, so I went by myself. And Gary was marrying some pretty rich scientist lady from the East Coast – had a doctorate and everything..."

"Divorced now?"

"Yep."

"Thought so."

"Yeah, we all saw it coming. But there was a free bar, and fuck man, I wasn't going to turn down free vintage champagne. So I took advantage of it, and got real drunk – like, _real _drunk, good and plastered drunk. Couldn't remember my own name drunk. You've been there, right?"

"Sure I have."

"Okay, so I got absolutely _fucked_ – and then I woke up the next morning in my hotel room with some guy. The bride's brother, it turned out. And I didn't remember a fucking thing – still don't. I remember being introduced and thinking he was hot – all thin lines and dark hair, just my type – but I don't remember pulling him. And he didn't remember either – he had a worse hangover than me, but...but I...shit, I ended up _naked in bed _with him. I mean, what else must I have done?"

"Did you tell your boyfr – Spock?"

"Yeah," Jim croaked. "Never driven so fast in my life. I brought him flowers and I was babbling apologies before he even got the door open and I was begging him to forgive me and give me another chance. He kicked me out but I kept calling him and posting notes through his mailbox and turning up at his workplace."

"Jesus, Jim."

"I kept expecting him to get out a restraining order on me, but I would've broken it because _fuck_, I loved him. I still do. I couldn't stand it if one stupid drunken mistake fucked it all up. I gave up the booze, you know – I didn't drink again until the following Christmas, and I cheated in July. And when he decided to give me another chance, shit, I splashed out something awful, took him anywhere he wanted to go, just trying to prove I wouldn't ever do it again..."

"Did he trust you again?"

"Eventually," Jim mumbled. His voice sounded oddly hoarse – thick and unwieldy. "We got back to normal. He moved in with me the following May."

"Why do I get the impression that this isn't the last of it?" McCoy asked quietly.

"Because it isn't," Jim croaked, then shook his head. "I can't. I can't...not right now. I just...I _can't_, I just _can't_..."

"Alright. Hey. Hey, c'mon, kid, it's alright. It's alright. C'mon." McCoy had dealt with plenty of people in tears before, though less commonly young men, and wasn't shy about slinging an arm around Jim's shoulders and squeezing tightly. "C'mon, s'alright," he soothed as the wracking sobs began to ease. "C'mon, that's it. Okay? Okay. C'mon, up you get. I'll drive you home."

"Can't," Jim breathed thickly. "Can't."

"Why not?"

"I don't know where home is, 'cause he's _gone_."


	8. Not Yet

**Notes: Nothing to say but thanks for all the feedback, and keep it coming!**

* * *

><p><em>Not Yet<em>

"D'you wanna come in?" Jim asked as they pulled up in front of his house, scrubbing the last of the tears from his face with the sleeve of his jacket. "I could use the company."

"Yeah, what the hell. I'm not in until the afternoon shift," McCoy shrugged, killing the engine. "You got tea?"

Jim snickered, still sounding somewhat tearful, as he unlocked the door. "Yeah. Shitloads of tea."

He wasn't kidding. The kitchen – a surprisingly pristine one, considering that the guy rolled around on a motorcycle in a leather jacket that, frankly, smelled like the cow it came from – contained a cupboard that, when Jim opened it, ejected three varieties of tea from the shoddily-heaped thirty-something-variety pile on the bottom shelf. Half of them were in boxes that didn't even have English labels on them.

"I'm guessing your boyfriend left these."

"He was half-Japanese," Jim said by way of explanation. "His Dad would have a fit though – his favourite was Earl Grey. Not remotely Japanese. Sometimes I brew a proper old-fashioned teapot of the stuff, and it smells like he's home. I don't even drink it."

"Used to come home to the smell?"

"Wake up to it, actually. He worked over in Iowa City, so I'd be home first. It was the mornings. I'd wake up and know he hadn't left yet because I could smell the tea. And if I could smell the tea from our room, then he'd have to be sitting in the living room with it," Jim smiled wistfully at the kettle. "I got tuned to that smell. I'd get up just in time to go down and say goodbye before he went to work."

"Long hours?"

"Yeah. Well. Longer than me. But more regular hours – he knew his working schedule _months _in advance," Jim's mouth twisted. "I started working Saturdays after he'd gone so I wouldn't have to be in the house two days in a row."

"Well, you've told me some of the bad shit," McCoy said, taking the offered mug of tea. "Tell me some of the good shit."

Jim led him over to the kitchen table, cupping his hands around his own mug, and nodded at the framed photographs on the windowsill. There were two, side-by-side, and he drew one forward for McCoy to get a better look. It was an out-of-focus, fuzzy shot taken in some sports bar, Jim sitting at a table with a beer in hand and grinning like a complete loon. It looked like the boyfriend had just joined them – he was looking somewhat sceptically at the camera, arms around Jim's neck, pulled down from standing behind him until their faces were level.

"I can't even remember where or when that was," Jim said, "but that was _him_. Even when I was being a baseball-obsessed moron, he'd just put up with it. He was perfect, man. He didn't care if I wanted to go out to the bar and watch the league with my buddies. It wasn't his thing, so he didn't do it, but he didn't care if I did, as long as I came home. And he'd keep an eye on the match times and half an hour after it was over, he'd come and get me. Never complained about it."

"Doesn't smile much, does he?"

"Never did," Jim shrugged, having clearly heard it all before. "He just wasn't really expressive like that. He'd smile for me sometimes – but he didn't need to. You ever know people like that?"

Hell, he'd _married _a woman like that. Jocelyn didn't smile much either, but he'd still known – for a while, at least – what she'd been thinking. "Sure."

Jim stared silently at the photo for a long minute, so McCoy turned his attention to the other one. It was a sedate, posed picture of Jim and the same unsmiling young man, standing in front of a picturesque view over an ocean bay. Although a smile creased Jim's face, it wasn't the wild glee of his wallet photo or the bar photo; it was tempered, artificial, restrained.

"We took that during our first summer together. We got together in December so we would have been together about...seven months, then. It's in Northern California. We went on a road trip and got this guy to take our photo. Spock ended up sending that one to his Mom because I look vaguely respectable in that. She hadn't seen me before."

"Seven months and she'd never seen you?"

Jim shook his head. "His parents both lived in Tokyo then. Actually, I'm pretty sure they're still there now – they were when he left."

"Which one's Japanese? His mother?"

"His Dad. His Mom's American. There was a big family falling out, so Spock left home and when he did, he dropped his family name," Jim grimaced. "I think Grayson was his Mom's maiden name. I really don't know all that much."

"You never talked about it?"

Jim shrugged. "Look, I know I'm spilling my guts to you, but...I dunno. I feel like I can trust you, man, and this is six months of really needing to spill this shit and not being able to. I really don't talk all that much – and Spock didn't want to discuss it. I picked things up – just little things, you know, and I've drawn my own conclusions, but I don't know if they're right."

"Still, four years..."

"The one time I pushed, he got...well, agitated," Jim hedged. "He got pretty upset and I didn't want to make it worse so I let it go. All I know is that he's a real mama's boy, but he couldn't live up to whatever expectations his old man had of him, and it caused a rift. There was some girl in there too – which is why I was a bit of a shock, shall we say – but it was mostly Spock and his Dad clashing like crazy over shit. I mean, _c'mon_, he moved _continents _to get away from the guy."

"What about your Mom? Did she like him?"

Jim winced. "Ah, yeah. My family isn't a whole lot better. My Dad died when I was a baby, and my Mom...you know, she was grieving and shit. And I wasn't the easiest kid in the world."

"Can't imagine," McCoy drawled.

Jim snickered lowly. "Me and my Mom don't talk. Haven't in years. She went back to Montana – that was how I met Spock. There was some complication with the deed so I had to see the family lawyer, and Spock had just started working in the same office. But Mom had already gone, and I haven't spoken to her since she left, so...no, she didn't meet him. Wouldn't have liked him, either. Mom's not big on gays."

"Ahh," McCoy shrugged. "Well, that explains a few things."

"Huh?"

"You've got no support network. Means it's hard enough to notice you _have _a problem, never mind actually _fix _the problem."

Jim dropped his gaze and hummed.

"Did Spock ever ask you to stop drinking?"

"...Once or twice. Yeah."

"Did you try?"

Jim chewed on his lip. "Well. He never...never asked when...look, I fucked up a few times, okay? Like in Omaha. And when I did, I'd go off the booze for a while, but he...he never asked at those times. He'd ask at other times, so..."

"So no."

"No," Jim echoed lamely. "No, I guess I didn't."

McCoy sighed, and pushed his tea away. "Jim, what aren't you telling me?"

"Huh?"

"It's pretty obvious that this is _all _wrapped up in your boyfriend. And y'know, fair play, but there's something you're not saying. This isn't just the usual _drinking drove him out _thing – you're too haunted for that. Something _happened_. You were together four years, and you're pretty keen to give me this picture-perfect boyfriend who never did a damn thing wrong, but something must have _happened_. And if he did nothing wrong, _ever_, then..."

"He _didn't_."

"So it was all you?"

"The whole thing? No. It wasn't _all_ me – but the end? The night he walked out? Yeah, that was all me," Jim said bitterly. "January eighteenth. He walked out January eighteenth. It was a Monday."

"What happened?" McCoy asked quietly.

There was a long silence, punctuated only by the endless ticking of the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. Jim's hands clenched and unclenched reflexively around the mug before he finally looked up, jaw clenched and eyes far too bright in his pale face.

"I can't," he said. "Not yet. Just not yet."

* * *

><p>After McCoy had gone, Jim logged onto the computer in the living room and scrolled through what Sulu had termed his 'stalker bookmarks.' He had bookmarked every account of Spock's that he knew of – from his Facebook page (long since deactivated) to the websites he traded stocks through. Most of it was useless, with no way to communicate with the account holder, but Jim had long since given up hoping that he'd find some link.<p>

Spock's email account had been deactivated – or programmed to block Jim – because every time he'd tried to make contact, the email had been bounced. His intense privacy meant that Spock had hidden well from search engines, and a Google search only ever brought up the accounts that Jim already had. His Facebook had been deactivated a week after he'd left, and never re-used.

He was gone.

It was a simple thing, and yet one that Jim constantly hoped would change. He had dug around in his memory – and in Spock's abandoned things – for his father's surname and added that to his hunt, but it had brought up nothing. He had tried every spelling he could think of for Spock's name, but came up short. He had hunted through the Facebook profiles of their mutual friends, looking for common new additions to their friends lists, but it yielded nothing.

Spock had quite elegantly _vanished _from the Internet – not that he'd ever had much presence there before.

Ironically, Spock's mother had a bigger presence than he did: she wrote a blog, _A Japanese Foreigner_, about being a Westerner in the Far East, and Jim had religiously followed her updates since Spock had disappeared, despite having no interest in the actual experiences of being a Westerner in Tokyo, or Niigata, or Sendai, or Tottori, or anywhere else for that matter. But she very rarely mentioned her family, and there had only ever been one point even remotely hinting towards what had happened: _and a final thought for my son, who's going through a difficult time at the moment_. As far as Jim could tell, that was the first her loyal followers would have heard about a son.

And that was _it_.

That was all. One line, dated three weeks after Spock had disappeared, and nothing more. She'd never mentioned her son again – but Jim kept watching, hoping that she'd give him something – _anything _– to go on. It wouldn't take much, just _something_. _Anything _– even one tiny line could give him somewhere to start, give him something to work with.

But not yet. He had to clean up, first. He had to be able to approach Spock sober and _better _and nothing like the asshole that had driven him away in the first place. He had to approach Spock like he'd changed – and for that to happen, he had to actually change.

So he watched, and waited – but he wouldn't act. Not _yet_.


	9. 26th August 2006

**Notes: So, we're having mass rioting in the UK at the moment - looting, fires, assaults, you name it. And I'm supposed to be going down to London. Ah, damn it.**

* * *

><p><em>26th August 2006<em>

Spock's colleagues were used to the sight of Jim's bike or car in the parking lot, or even the man himself loitering in the lobby in his offensive-to-lawyers leather jacket and jeans, but he still earned himself a few scathing looks as he walked, bold as brass, onto the main office floor and made a beeline for Spock's desk. If he didn't know that Spock wasn't prone to discussing personal matters with his co-workers, he would have thought he'd been exposed as a cheating bastard.

Well, he deserved to be.

"Hey," he said, stepping around Spock's desk instead of occupying the chair, and crouching down by Spock's chair instead to slip his arms around that trim waist. "It's ten past five."

"I will only be another ten minutes…"

Jim sighed heavily, pressing his face into the cotton shirt. "Spock, c'mon. It's ten past five on a Friday. Everyone else is packing up, and I packed for you so we can go straight from here."

"P- Jim, what?"

"I'm taking you away for the weekend," Jim said quietly.

"…It is almost a month until…"

"Yeah, and we'll go again for your birthday. This isn't about your birthday. This is about me being sorry," Jim whispered earnestly.

Spock simply stared at him. "Jim…"

"I did a shitty, _shitty_ thing, and I'm never going to be that drunk again, and I'm taking you away for four whole days – don't give me that look, you had Monday off anyway, and you can call in sick Tuesday – and I'm going to spend four days indulging in completely shameless _worship_, because I _am _sorry, Spock, I'm so sorry."

Spock took a deep breath. "I…I know you are, Jim, but…it's going to take time…"

"Come with me," Jim said sharply, standing up and looming until Spock logged off and gathered his things. His demeanour must have been intimidating – nobody said goodbye as they headed for the elevators. Just shy of them, he tugged Spock into the men's room and locked the door behind them before gripping Spock tightly by the shoulders.

"I know it's going to take time," he said fiercely, "but I also know _you_. I've made you doubt yourself with that fucking idiocy – you're thinking you're not enough, that I'll get bored, whatever."

Spock paled. "I…"

"_No. _You don't get to blame yourself for my fuckwittery…"

Spock cracked a tiny smile at the inventive phraseology.

"…and I won't let you do it. That's why I'm doing this. I know it'll take time, and I swear to God we have that time, but let me do this. I'm going to spend four days catering to your every weird Asian whim – and trust me, I've seen Japanese porn, and it's _weird _– and you're just going to have to put up with it and get indulged. Okay?"

Spock stared at him for a long moment, and Jim _hated _the wariness in his face, before he finally dropped his gaze and nodded.

"It wasn't anything to do with you," Jim breathed, pressing their foreheads together. Spock still wouldn't look up, even when Jim's arms came right around him, eliminating any personal space he might have wanted to keep. "It wasn't _anything _to do with you. It was me being drunk out of my mind until I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It wasn't _any _reflection on you, or _us_."

"…If I had been there…"

"No," Jim shook him. "_No_. You shouldn't have to follow me to every little function, especially ones that would have bored you. You should be able to trust me. This wasn't your fault. It wasn't even _about _you. It was just _me_, and I've not drunk a damn thing since, so it _won't _be me, ever again. _Ever_."

He tilted his head to brush a small kiss across Spock's mouth, and closed his eyes in relief when it was hesitantly – almost shyly – returned.

"You gonna let me do this?" he asked.

"…Very well."

"C'mon then," Jim squeezed him close for a moment before unlocking the door and pushing him towards the elevators. "I brought the car – I didn't think you'd appreciate a long road trip on the back of the bike."

"I – no."

The Friday receptionist was a homophobic bitch, so Jim took special delight in walking towards the parking lot with his arm around Spock's waist, and giving him a quick kiss when they reached the 'car' (actually a battered hunk of metal that had _once _been a car) and were still in view from her desk.

"I am not sure that kissing me because you dislike Miss Astansi is a good way to begin your apologies," Spock murmured against his lips, and Jim laughed – not because the joke was especially funny, but because Spock apparently felt relaxed enough to joke.

"No, I'm kissing you because I can't get enough of kissing you," he replied, and did it again to be obnoxious. "Pissing her off is just a bonus."

"I see."

Jim finally let him get _into _the car (only to lean through the open window and kiss him again anyway) and gave Miss Astansi an obnoxious wave as he sauntered around to the driver's side door and flung himself into the hunk of junk with no grace whatsoever.

"Where are we going?" Spock asked as Jim threw the car in gear and backed out of the parking lot.

"Out of Iowa. And no, not into Nebraska. I'm not _that _tactless."

"Is that a way of saying that I am not going to receive an answer?"

"Yeah," Jim grinned, and reached over to squeeze Spock's hand. "Just sit back and relax. You don't get to do anything else for four days, so you might as well start now."


	10. January Eighteenth

**Notes: And I finally quench your thirst for the details of the night Spock walked out.**

* * *

><p><em>January Eighteenth<em>

Spock's birthday was in the middle of September – the seventeenth, to be precise, and it was both a blessing and a curse.

Its approach had Jim more firmly glued to his goal than he had been thus far. He got it into his head that Spock's birthday was not a milestone for its age value, but for Jim's progress – if he could make it to Spock's birthday, and more than that, actually _make _Spock's birthday, entirely sober, then he was winning the fight.

In the run-up, it was a weird but functional distraction. By the time the seventeenth rolled around, he'd finally stopped craving a beer after work (with the possible exceptions of the days he had to work with Fitzpatrick) and he'd been sober for three weeks, absolutely solid. The calendar McCoy had given him was decorated with crosses all in a solid, unbroken row.

But he hadn't foreseen the trouble that the seventeenth itself would give him.

Spock had never celebrated his birthday as a kid. His father had called it wasteful, and Spock had quickly learned to dissuade his mother from celebrating it either. When Jim had insisted on taking him away for the weekend for the first birthday they'd been together for, Spock hadn't known what to do or say. Jim had taken him away to the West Coast for three nights, and had paid for everything with a fierce tenacity.

Spock had had no idea what to do – and when the Sunday had rolled around and Jim had wished him a happy birthday at sunrise on the beach, there'd been a horrible moment when Jim had thought he was about to cry.

And Jim had gotten the whole story. Ever since, he'd made a special effort for Spock's birthdays that he didn't even make for Christmas, as if he was attempting to outweigh the missed ones that had gone before.

Only for this one, Spock wasn't here.

It was a big one too – he was thirty. The big three-oh. Jim had teased him, the year before, that his twenty-ninth was the end of an era of big spontaneous holidays, and soon Jim would have to start giving him mature presents, like underwear. Spock had only snarked at him for that.

So Jim woke up on September seventeenth _already _feeling like shit.

He was wholly unsurprised when Sulu came to pick him up from work, and came home with him, a collection of action DVDs in his bag and a cautious look on his face. Even Sulu knew what today was, because Jim hadn't spent a September seventeenth in the goddamn _state _since 2005.

"I don't want to talk about it," Jim said flatly, the moment that they got home, and Sulu simply nodded and went to set up the TV.

It felt wrong to simply ignore it, though. Jim had always made such a big deal, and gotten such a gorgeous fucking smile for it, that it felt weird to ignore it.

In the end, he logged onto Mrs. Grayson's blog, and rattled off a quick private message to her, hoping that he wouldn't wake up in the morning to find a horse's head in his bed or something.

_Hello Mrs. Grayson,_

_It's Jim. I'm sure you remember me: the dick who broke your son's heart. But can you just pass on a message from me to him: tell him that I wish him a happy birthday, and that I miss him, and that I'm sorry, and that I love him. And I hope he's safe and okay. That's all, and thank you. I won't bother you again._

_Sincerely,_

_James Kirk._

"Hey," Sulu called from the kitchen, where he was bullying the microwave into performing its juju on popcorn. "You're quiet. You okay?"

"M'fine," Jim said, and frowned at the screen.

_Message sent_.

* * *

><p>"Jim," Sulu said once <em>Saw 6823<em> (or whatever) rolled the credits. "You keep dropping hints about tracking your ex down and patching things up."

"Yeah," Jim said warily.

"Do you mean that?"

"Yes."

Sulu fidgeted. "I mean…are you sure that's a good idea? If things ended that badly, maybe you should just…y'know. Move on?"

Jim swallowed, and said, "So, if Janice dumped you, and I said to just move on, you would?"

Sulu hesitated then shrugged. "No. No I guess not."

"Exactly. Even if he doesn't take me back, I have to tell him that I'm sorry," Jim said flatly.

"D'you reckon he will? Take you back, I mean?"

"He shouldn't," Jim said quietly.

Sulu stared at him for a long moment, before setting down his bottle of Pepsi and shifting closer on the couch. "Jim. You never told me what happened the night he left. All I got was a call the next day that he was missing – you never told me what actually happened."

Jim said nothing, staring at the coffee table.

"Jim. Tell me what happened."

"I was a fucking bastard dickhead _asshole_, that's what happened," Jim snapped. "Just leave it!"

"No offence, Jim, but you're kind of always a bit of an asshole," Sulu prodded. "C'mon, man. What happened?"

Jim was shaking, and his hands clenched into fists in his lap. When Sulu shifted to put an arm around him, every muscle in his back was knotted into fierce shape, clenched and ready for…for something.

"Tell me."

"Monday, January eighteenth."

Jim's voice was flat and far away, as though he were numbly reciting something off a board.

"I'd reapplied for my old job, thinking maybe the new boss would be willing to take me back on, but the rejection letter came that morning. And...Spock and I had had a bit of an argument before he went to work, so I just got up and started drinking and kept going."

He hesitated, mouth working silently for almost twenty seconds before he carried on, his voice hoarser.

"Spock came home late – I can't remember when, about seven o'clock, maybe. I was off my ass by that point; I didn't even notice he was in the house until he told me to get my feet off the coffee table. I…I asked why he was home late and he said something about a meeting, and I threw back that I spent all day waiting at home for him, the least he could've done was call."

Sulu winced.

"He didn't say anything, just went into the kitchen, and I got really fucking pissed and told him not to walk away from me, and I followed him. I was drunk off my ass and waving this damn bottle of fucking piss-weak beer around like a conductor, and I don't think he must have understood half of what I was slurring…"

"And then what?" Sulu prompted gently when Jim broke off to take several deep breaths.

"I started in on him," he croaked. "Shit, Sulu, I sounded like some fucking abusive boyfriend. I was going on all this shit like he was living in my house so I shouldn't have to put up with his bullshit and it was my fucking coffee table so I could put my feet wherever I liked, and why was he late home…and then he started trying to reason with me – you remember all that calm-and-serene Buddhist thing he had going? Well, he was trying to keep everything quiet and calm, and I just…I fucking lost it, called him a condescending asshole who was just taking advantage of me and my rent-free home, and clearly the only thing I was any good for in his world was sex, so…so…"

"Oh Jesus."

"So I said…I said if he wanted sex he was gonna get it," Jim was shivering badly, shaking under Sulu's arm like a palsy patient. "I…I said i-if he was gonna live under my roof he'd have to pay, and I…"

Sulu felt sick. He didn't want to hear this. He'd expected a flaming row, but not this. _He didn't want to hear this_.

"I fucking _assaulted _him. I tried to get his pants off, kept telling him he owed me, and he kept pushing me away, and eventually he just went for it and slapped me – and the guy has an arm, you know? And I just…I went fucking mad, because he'd dared hit me – never mind what _I'd _tried to do! – and I…oh God, Sulu, I hit him. I still had that bottle and I fucking hit him with it."

They were both shaking, Sulu swallowing against the heart in his throat, and Jim a faint green as though he were going to be sick.

"I fucking bottled him. I fucking bottled him. I smashed it open on his _head_, and he nearly collapsed, he was bleeding everywhere, and he just…he just _looked _at me, like, like…like he didn't know who I was. And I was so drunk and so angry and I was screaming that that's what he got for hitting me, that's what he got for being such a…a…I called him fucking frigid, I know I did, and I'd just tried to fucking _rape _him…"

"What then?" Sulu croaked. "What happened then, Jim? What then?"

"I dunno, maybe he realised he needed out, or whatever, I don't know, but he lashed out – he could barely see straight, he was ready to fucking collapse, but he lashed out at me, punched me in the stomach…and I'd had so much, he knew what he was doing, and there I was with my head in the sink puking up, and I heard the front door slamming – and he was gone. And I just…I didn't fucking care! I was so fucking _angry_, I just went round the house smashing things up and ended up passed out in the bathroom, and then when I woke up, he wasn't _home_ and it was like noon and there was a message on the phone from his boss asking why he hadn't shown up…"

Sulu remembered the next day. Jim had called him during his lunch hour, hungover and panicking, babbling something about Spock being missing. The police had been called out, and he'd spent nearly a week at Jim's, trying to stop him drinking himself to death, until the police came back with news that Spock had gotten in touch with them and said it was just an argument, and he was fine, and to call off the search.

But he'd not come back.

"I thought I'd killed him, Sulu," Jim whispered, his voice almost completely gone by this point. "I thought I'd killed him. I broke into his apartment, but he wasn't there, and his cell phone was switched off, and his boss said he hadn't come in or called in, and I…I thought I'd killed him. I was so sure they were going to find his body in a ditch somewhere – I was so fucking _scared_…and the _police_, Jesus, they were just…they didn't care! They weren't interested in finding him – it was just a bust-up between a couple of faggots, they didn't give a _fuck_. I told them _everything_, I told them the whole thing, I should be in fucking _prison _for this, but they just didn't _care_. They weren't going to waste time on a couple of queers having a row – he could have been _dead_, and they didn't care!"

He swallowed hard, and shook his head. Sulu squeezed his shoulder, hard, and wondered exactly how he'd waited six months to get this story.

"That's why he can't take me back, Sulu. He can't. It would be the dumbest fucking thing in the whole world. But that's also why I have to be stone cold sober when I find him. I _can't _risk that again, I _can't_. I can't ever risk that again."


	11. Breaking the Ice

**Notes: So much response! I'd love you guys, but...nah, fuck it: I love you guys!**

* * *

><p><em>Breaking the Ice<em>

In the run between Spock's birthday and Christmas, Jim was very, very far from perfect.

Sulu was the first person – since the police – that he had told about the night of the eighteenth, and the fact that he hadn't run away screaming or called the cops to re-open the case and get Jim locked away for domestic abuse had given him a strange sort of confidence.

McCoy simply raised an eyebrow, said cryptically that 'why do men always have to be so damn difficult?' and handed him an official AA pamphlet.

"I don't much use them," he said, "but those are the original twelve steps to recovery. Now I don't tend to use them in the open meets – not everybody's into God, and despite what they'll push you, those things don't _always _work. And I think you could skip a fair few of them – but this one? This is what you need to do."

_Make a list of the people you have harmed and make direct amends_.

"Direct amends?"

"Usually seek 'em out, apologise, explain, and do something in penance. Very Catholic," McCoy snorted. "But a lot of people write letters the first time around. No use turnin' up on someone's doorstep to apologise if all they're likely to do is get the family shotgun and sort out your addiction issues for you, is there?"

"I guess not," Jim said quietly, fingering the pamphlet. "Do I…do I have to show you? Or send them?"

"You don't have to show anyone, and you don't have to send them unless you're ready. But it's part of accepting your flaws, and it's the hardest damn thing you can ever ask a man to do: accept he was wrong, admit to someone else he was wrong, and try to make amends _for _the wrong. It's damn hard, Jim, but I think you'd be surprised how many recovering alcoholics I've seen manage to rebuild their lives after that step."

Jim clutched the pamphlet tightly. "He…he won't want to hear from me."

"Well, it won't just be him, will it?"

"Huh?"

"Spock's the most obvious one with you, but what about the rest? That buddy of yours who kept you afloat – you don't think he _never _thought about walking away too? Your colleagues you let down, or the bosses you've cussed out over the years? Your neighbours, having to put up with your shouting arguments at all hours when you were in the depths of it? Your boyfriend's family?"

Jim swallowed. "Shit."

"Go on, Jim. Make your list, and start thinking about it."

* * *

><p>Surprisingly, the first letter that he wrote was not to Spock, or to Sulu, or his mother, or even to the long-suffering, eye-rolling, shit-scary Janice.<p>

It was to Amanda Grayson.

Jim had only met Spock's mother once, and when the relationship was already failing. Spock was the only member of his family in America for the whole time that Jim knew him, and the estrangement with his father meant that Jim had never so much as spoken to them over the phone – but then Amanda had apparently gotten tired of having no idea who it was (bar a couple of photographs and very vague descriptions) that her son was dating and had paid a visit.

She had _not _approved.

They had only just avoided a massive argument in her presence – and by that, read that the argument had been minor, by their standards – and she had cut the visit short with a dark look at Jim and insisted that Spock walk her to her rented car. Jim had watched them argue by said car, and knew damn well that his boyfriend's mother wholeheartedly did not approve of him – and it had added further strain to an already strained situation.

At the time, Jim had been indignant that she'd formed such a low opinion of him…but now he had to admit that she'd been right.

Still, he was surprised to find the first letter he wrote to be for her – particularly as he had never reached to make amends for that visit before. Ever.

_Dear Amanda,_

_It's Jim Kirk here, and I'm certain that you remember me. I know I said I'd not bother you again, but I have to do this, and you're first on my list. I've rewritten this letter two or three times and it's never quite coming out the way I want it to, so I'm just sending what I've got and hope that it'll go some way to explaining what happened._

_First off, I'm not making excuses for myself. What I did was inexcusable, and that's that. I can't ever hope that you – or more importantly, your son – will forgive me, but I owe you an explanation and more than that, I owe you an apology._

_I am an alcoholic. That is the cold, hard truth and something that I will not deny again. My drinking destroyed my relationship with your son. My drinking was responsible for everything that went wrong, and my drinking drove him away. I didn't seek help until he was gone for almost six months, because I couldn't face the fact that I was wholly responsible for losing the best thing that ever happened to me. But now I am facing up to it, and I'm not going to hide from that truth again. I am an alcoholic: I attend weekly meetings, and sometimes I fall off the wagon, and I hate myself when I do, and this letter is part of trying to piece the remnants of my existence back together. I made a list of everyone I hurt, and your son was top of that list._

_By proxy, then, I hurt you too. I know Spock didn't ever really discuss our relationship with you, but he talked to me about you. He kept pictures in his apartment, and then in our house, and he would tell me stories about you. He absolutely adored you, even if he never said a word about his father, and if you are even a quarter of the woman that he described to me, then you must have been sorely hurt by the way I treated – mistreated – him in the end. And for that, I am so sorry._

_I hurt your son, but please believe me when I say that I never set out to hurt him. I love him. I still love him, even though he's gone, and I will always love him. I never set out to hurt him. I only ever intended to love him and build a life with him, and support him in every way that I could. Your son is the most important person in the world to me – he still is – and he made those four years of my life the best four years of my life._

_I would also like to apologise to you. I don't know how much Spock told you about those last few months, and I won't tell you myself because that is his choice to make now. But I will say that I owe you an apology as well as him. You should have been able to trust me with his welfare, and you didn't – you couldn't. No decent mother would have trusted me with their son from that meeting, and I don't blame you for your reaction. I should have lived up to the reasonable expectations that you had of me, and I failed to do so._

_I will say this: I wasn't always a complete prick to your son. I drank in the beginning but not badly; I wasn't usually drunk. But after I lost my job, I started drinking more and more, and I resented his success. I was uncomfortable being the unemployed stay-at-home idiot while he was off being generally brilliant and successful, and I grew to resent that. It was awful of me, and I knew it was, so I drank to forget about it._

_Then, because I was drinking nearly all day and nearly every day except for the weekends when he was home with me, I stopped doing all the household stuff – chores, DIY, cooking, whatever. I stopped doing it, so he did it. And that made me feel even worse, like I was some useless invalid that he had to take care of like a child, even though it was my fault. So I would drink even more, and I resented him for it even though I shouldn't have done._

_In the end, I was drinking all day and every day. I would argue with him, pick fights, and belittle him whenever I could – and I hate myself for that more than you can possibly know. I would put him and his work down; when we fought, I'd say I didn't need him even though it was completely untrue. I chipped away at his confidence and you have no idea of how much I absolutely hate myself for that now. More than you could ever hate me, I promise you. I destroyed him, I tore him apart, and I will never be able to forgive myself for that._

_But I wasn't always like that. I loved him, and we had a good couple of years before it got really bad. Two and a half, actually, that you never saw. And they were the best years. I absolutely worshipped him, and I like to think I made him feel good and safe and happy for those two and a half years. Did he tell you about his birthdays? This year was the first I spent September seventeenth in Iowa since 2005 – we always went away. I'd take him away somewhere, and he'd just look at me like I'd given him the world, not a weekend break in a three star hotel somewhere. And he was my world. _

_And I wasn't completely stupid either. When I asked him to move in with me, I said it was just a test drive and that if we hadn't killed each other by the third year, I'd propose. I never did, because I knew it would be a stupid move when things weren't going well. I wasn't a complete moron – at least, not all the time._

_He was my whole world, and when he walked out, he took it with him. And I've missed him every hour of every day since, and I can never repent enough for what I did._

_I can't ask you to forgive me for any of it, but I can ask that you read this through and consider what I have to say for myself. It's not excuses because there aren't any, and I swear to you that if I can find him and apologise, I will do it literally on my knees. And if he forgives me, then I'll make him take it back because I don't deserve it – but he deserves to know that I'm so sorry. I don't really hope that you'll do it, but I'd like it if you could tell Spock I'm at least trying to get myself back in order. I don't expect you will – he is undoubtedly better off without me and my issues around – but I'm going to ask anyway._

_I'm sorry to bother you, and I'm sorry for not being the man that your son deserved. And please vet anyone else as much as you did me, because he deserves someone who won't break his heart and destroy him. He deserves all that happiness and security that I should have given him. He really, really does._

_Yours sincerely,_

_James T. Kirk._

_[Message sent]_


	12. 19th December 2006

**Notes: My internet providers are bastards and have fucked up my wireless. So I will try to keep on top of updates, but I can no longer promise anything. FML. **

* * *

><p><em>19th December, 2006<em>

"That the last of 'em?" Jim asked, taking the box from Spock as he stepped down from the ladder.

"I believe so," came the sedate response, and he reached to brush the dust from his hair. The attic was crowded with all the things that the Kirks had never bothered to keep in plain sight, or couldn't – old furniture, suitcases, Christmas decorations, and so on – and was, for a room that nobody went into very often, insanely dusty.

"Wow," Jim said, grinning and plucking the front of Spock's shirt, eyeing the dust lines. "That's impressive."

Spock wore an expression of mild distaste, and Jim laughed, following him into the bedroom as he stripped off his shirt and rummaged in his overnight bag for a replacement. And that pose, bent over his bag shirtless with that perfect ass in the air, was far too tempting, and Jim crossed the room in two strides to hook his arms around that lean stomach and more-or-less haul him onto the bed.

"Jim!" Spock admonished, but he dropped the shirt he'd been reaching for and fell back into the mattress without real protest.

"You flashed your ass at me!" Jim protested, licking a long stripe from Spock's hip to his shoulder, taking great care to go right over his left nipple in the process.

"I did no such thing," Spock informed him, a little breathless but keeping his composure.

"Well, you nearly did," Jim said, sitting back – and stopped, seizing Spock's left wrist. "What the…?"

The boxes had had sharp corners, and dug into Spock's arms when he'd lifted them, creating faint pink strips at his elbows and wrists. And slicing through the pink were several narrow, long lines, completely white and razor-thin…

Razor thin.

"Oh my God," Jim breathed, running his fingers over them. They barely made a dent in the skin, but when he pressed along the unbruised part of the forearm, he could still just about feel them. "Oh my God."

"Jim. Jim, stop. _Jim_. It is alright, Jim…"

"Alright?" he choked, dropping Spock's left arm and going for the right. They were there too – fewer, but wider and deeper, more obvious to the touch if still barely visible. "_Spock_. Oh God, Spock, are these…did you…?"

Spock shifted to sit up, but Jim clamped his knees around Spock's hips and held him down.

"Spock," he said, taking a deep breath to compose himself. "Spock, are those…self-inflicted?"

He knew that they were. He'd seen those lines before – on random kids throughout high school, fresh or faded depending on the time of year – on _Carol_, the pretty, sharp girl he'd knocked boots with in tenth grade, with all the potential in the world...

Only Carol was gone now.

"Spock?" he breathed. "Are...are they?"

Spock was watching him with a surprisingly open expression, dark eyes drinking in every movement of Jim's face. "Yes."

A sob rose in Jim's chest, and he wasn't quite successful in beating it down.

"Jim, no," Spock said, reaching up and wrapping those scarred arms around his neck, drawing him down into a hug. Jim clung to him, working his arms under that bare torso until he had him in an unbreakable hold. "Jim, it's alright. Jim, _listen _to me. They are _not _recent, Jim – they are _old_, very old…"

"How old? _How _old?" Jim insisted, rising up enough to stare Spock in the face again. "When was the last time you…?"

"When I first moved to the USA," Spock replied. Jim performed a deft calculation – the late nineties, then. "That was the last time. The majority of them were inflicted in early adolescence. Jim, I promise you, it _is _alright. I have not injured myself for a very long time."

"You promise?"

"I promise, Jim."

"Why…" Jim choked, shaking his head and sitting up – still astride Spock's hips – to take that left arm and run his fingers down the crossing network of scars again. "Why have I never noticed this? A _year_, Spock, and I have _never _noticed this!"

"You only noticed it now because of the bruising."

"But…!"

"Jim, look at them. They do not show against the skin. Even I have difficulty locating them, and they are more obvious to me than most because I already know about them."

Jim pressed a kiss to the delicate inside of the wrist. "Is this why you wear long sleeves in the summer?"

"Partially, yes. It _is _also cooler here than in Tokyo, most of the time; I am perfectly comfortable in long sleeves."

Jim swallowed, leaning down again to look Spock dead in the eye. "Did you…?"

"Jim?" Spock prompted.

Jim closed his eyes and said, "Did you ever try to kill yourself?"

"_No_," Spock said firmly, twisting his fingers into Jim's hair. "No, Jim. I promise you that. I never made an attempt at suicide, not even then. And I have absolutely no intentions of doing so."

"Thank _fuck_," Jim choked, burying his face in Spock's neck and sliding his arms underneath him to engage in that death-grip once again. "Oh God, thank God…"

"Ssh, Jim, it's alright," Spock murmured, stroking his hair. "It is well, Jim. I am fine. It is ancient history, nothing more, and I am quite well."

"You promise me," Jim breathed into his neck. "You have to promise me, if you ever…if you ever feel like…like _that _again, like doing that, you…you have to tell me, okay? You have to tell me, Spock, you have to."

"I will," Spock promised, shifting one hand to draw patterns into the back of Jim's t-shirt. He was wholly unsurprised when Jim shifted and stole his breathing with a deep, hungry kiss, pushing him deep into the mattress, welding them together almost desperately.

"I fucking love you," came a somewhat unromantic, but heartfelt, declaration before Jim's skilled, steady hands began to fiddle with the zipper on Spock's pants. "I fucking _need _you, you make me less shit, I _need _you…"

If he lavished rather more attention than usual on Spock's hands and arms, then Spock wasn't going to complain.


	13. Breaking Point

**Notes: For those in the know, this is the chapter I was referring to when I laughed about the coincidence of drinking wine during editing. **

* * *

><p><em>Breaking Point<em>

Jim woke up on the fifth of December, and felt the weight crushing his chest like a physical thing, his throat already raw in his throat, and the crosses on the calendar mocking his inability to change and get better and get his life back, sneering and sniggering at him almost audibly across the room.

Five years.

Five years _exactly_. Five years ago _exactly_, Jim had stopped in front of Spock's desk in that small fourth-floor office in Iowa City, and asked him out on a date, mustering up all the manly balls he had to ask out a guy he didn't even know was gay.

Later – _much _later – he'd decided that the fifth was their anniversary, and that if they ever got married, they would do it on the fifth of December so Jim could just remember the one date forever, and Spock had just looked at him and more or less told him that marrying in the middle of winter in North America was out of the question, thank you very much, and then Jim had laughed and kissed him and said that they would just have to go and get married in Thailand instead, and Spock had countered with the fact that he didn't speak Thai.

Just the _memory _made Jim want to cry.

It was a Sunday. He should have woken up wrapped around Spock's abandoned pillow. He _should _have gone downstairs to find a fry up waiting for him, because their anniversary was one of only two dates Spock would unbend enough to cook meat for Jim – the other date being his birthday. He should have thanked him with couch sex, only after being flatly informed that sex in the kitchen was not on, and then he should have apologised for the laughably awkward couch sex with _proper _sex in their bed, all lazy and sensual and hedonistic. He should have tried talking Spock into taking Monday off, been soundly rejected, and then threatened him loudly and constantly with no sex until Spock shut him up with a blowjob in the shower, even though they both knew Jim was wholly incapable of keeping his hands (and libido) off Spock for more than a day. He should be thinking about what to wear to whatever restaurant reservation he'd made for the evening, and how easy it should be to get it off again once they got home – or into a lonely area in Spock's car with the spacious backseat – and planning how to talk Spock into bathroom sex at the restaurant, and hoping that they had a quiet table out of the way so that Spock wouldn't get uncomfortable if Jim tried running his foot up Spock's leg.

Who was he kidding? Their fifth anniversary? He should be wearing a fucking ring.

In just over a month, it would be a whole year since Spock walked out. A whole year; January eighteenth, 2011, and it would have been a whole, soul-destroying year. That would have to be another anniversary in Jim's life, then: the anniversary of the day he completely destroyed it. A whole _year_, and he was nowhere near over how things had gone wrong, and nowhere near over the fact that, in all likelihood, it would never go right.

Spock wasn't even his first serious partner – just the first he'd ever gotten to thoughts of marriage. Before Spock had been Carol – gorgeous Carol with her ambitions and her smile and her endless legs. But even she hadn't really come close: Carol had died, at the end of tenth grade, unable to cope with some mysterious _something _that nobody had ever figured out, and Jim had _mourned_, certainly, but...but he'd _recovered_. He'd gotten over it, gotten over _her_.

But this time…this time it was about to hita _year_, and he was nowhere close. He still woke up every morning and _remembered _that he was all alone now, and that he deserved to be, and sometimes being a girl would be so much easier because then he could've had a long cry and feel a bit better for it at the end.

When in the hell was he supposed to get over this?

* * *

><p>Jim ended up not dragging himself out of bed until well into the afternoon, ignoring several calls from Sulu and ending up with his laptop by the window, watching the heavy clouds trying to decide whether to snow or not. He had started a letter to his mother the next before, but abandoned it in favour of beginning an incoherent ramble at Spock.<p>

_It should have been our fifth anniversary today_.

He kept glancing at his left hand. Fuck, five years. He'd meant to propose in the third year. When the fourth had rolled around, and things were still patchy, he'd promised himself that he'd fix it so that they would wake up on the fifth anniversary with at least engagement rings. But only a month later, that dream had been permanently dashed.

_We should be wearing rings – engagement or wedding, but rings – and Sulu should be moaning that I wasn't marrying him after all our devoted years together, and you should be doing your not-laughing-but-obviously-wanting-to thing._

_I should have woken up to the smell of Earl Grey and bacon this morning, and you should have woken up with me drooling on your shoulder, 'cause I'm gross like that._

Spock had always worn a t-shirt to bed (except when Jim ripped it off) because of the drooling thing. He'd never complained, but he'd never had to. Jim had known.

_I should have made reservations, and hidden a blanket and a box of tissues and a condom in the trunk of your car._

Hell, did he even own condoms anymore?

_When you walked out, you took my libido with you. It's dead. I haven't even jerked off since you left – I just don't care anymore. You killed my sex drive, and I don't even miss it, because I don't have you._

He couldn't actually remember the last time he'd had sex, because those last eighteen days had been a blur of alcohol-smeared fuzz. He remembered the messy, almost teenage fumblings in the shadows of Sulu's house after that New Year's party, and they'd been so lucky not to get caught screwing in public, but he couldn't remember if that was the last time – and if it was, then it was just thoroughly depressing. A quick, dirty fuck up against the outside wall of a house in the freezing cold that neither of them had really enjoyed very much.

_If I could, I'd relearn every inch of you, and I'd take days to do it. I'd repeat your twenty-eighth birthday – spirit you away and spend a week just loving you, with everything I had._

The inside of his entire torso, from hips to neck, was aching and he could feel his pulse in the side of his jugular.

_And I do still love you. I never stopped loving you. Even when I was a complete asshole, I still loved you. I just didn't appreciate you enough – or at all. I just put the alcohol above you, and I hate myself for that. But you? I still love you._

And there was the truth – right there. That was the thing that no amount of abstinence or recovery was going to help him with.

_I think I'll always love you_.

He slammed the laptop closed and pitched himself off the window seat, storming out of the house and barely pausing to grab his jacket against the icy cold outside. The sky glowered as dark as his temper as he stalked down the road to the store, the odd neighbour that he passed keeping out of his way at the expression on his face.

Not drinking wasn't going to make being _alone _any fucking easier.

It wasn't going to fucking _help_! Spock had _gone_, Spock had _bailed_, and he would never be coming back, so what the fuck was Jim hoping for? Some kind of fucking miracle? Some kind of fucking _saviour_?

"Hey Jim," the cashier, a local girl called Lori he'd known since they were kids, greeted him but didn't say another word after catching sight of his face, and silently scanned through the four bottles of cheap-as-fuck wine that he slammed down in front of her.

He stormed home in much the same fashion, the bottles clinking in their plastic bag like music he'd long missed. He could almost feel the liquid swimming in them, and when he lined them up on the kitchen table, they were _familiar_, like visiting family or friends coming home.

"Fuck it," he snarled, rummaging for a corkscrew and a glass. "_Fuck _it. I can't _fucking_ win, I can't _fucking _escape, I can't – oh, fuck it!"

He forewent the glass, and tore the cork out of the first bottle almost brutally, tipping it back and chugging without any grace or awareness of the sheer size of it. He downed it in under five minutes, his teeth and mouth and chin stained a deep red, like watery blood, and then he crossed calmly to the bin by the kitchen door and smashed the bottle against the wall until the shards rained down like powder into the trash.

The sound of smashing glass _bounced _in his skull, rattling off his auditory senses and tearing into his memory, adding a spray of the blood to the glitter and the uneasy, staggering gait of an injured man, and huge confused eyes, _hurt _eyes, _begging with him_, from the one man who should never have had to beg him for _anything_, a man _he _had injured…

"Oh _God_," he breathed, and burst into hysterical tears. "Oh God. Oh God, oh God, _ohgodohgodohgodohgod_..."

The broken glass shimmered like an enticing mirage, and his stomach rolled. In moments, he had his head in the sink, vomiting until he thought his guts were going to come up, just like he had eleven months ago, and over the sound of his retching, he imagined the hasty slam of the front door that had signalled the end of his life.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm so sorry…" he sobbed hysterically, fumbling with the tap to wash away the pink-streaked vomit, thin and watery and foamy, like toothpaste-spit when your gums were bleeding, and turned to the three bottles that waited for him, chest heaving and face streaked with tears and vomit and _wine_, brilliant red _betraying _wine.

They _waited_, and he wanted to scream.

And then he _did_ scream.

"Fuck you! Fuck the fucking lot of you! Just fuck off, fuck off, you destroyed it, you destroyed everything, _you fucking killed me_!" he screamed, incoherent with blind rage and _hate_, so much _hate _that it curled into his ribs and his lungs and suffocated him, until he swept an arm blindly through them and sent them all smashing to the floor in a rain of glass and wine and blood. "You won't fucking win! You can't fucking beat me! You _fucking _hear me? That's the last _fucking _time – _the last motherfucking goddamn time_!"


	14. Minneapolis

**Notes: **

* * *

><p><em>Minneapolis<em>

On December twenty-ninth, Jim woke up to a shock waiting in his inbox – an email from 'Amanda G.' He hadn't known Spock's mother's email address – he had sent his own letter via the blog messaging system – but when he opened it, he found that letter copied and pasted underneath an incredibly short, terse three lines.

_James,_

_Thank you for your letter. Minneapolis._

_Mrs. Grayson._

Minneapolis. Was that a location? Was that where Spock was? Well, hell, what else could it be? More to the point, why was she telling him? Did she think they needed to talk? Or was it just to throw Jim off talking to her again, by giving him such a vague pointer. Minneapolis wasn't Riverside; it wasn't like he could just park himself on a bench by the local store and wait until Spock needed to buy something. Minneapolis was fucking _big_, and even if he was there, Jim could spend the rest of his life in the city and never see him.

So he did whatever he did these days when he needed help: he called Sulu.

"The fuck, man? It's seven in the morning! Fuck off!"

"Sulu. He's in Minneapolis."

"Who, fucking _Santa_?"

"_Spock_."

There was a groan – a distinctly feminine one, in the background, but for once Jim couldn't muster the intellect to be afraid of the fact that Janice was going to kill him for waking them up.

"Spock's in Minneapolis?"

"Yes."

"And you know this how?"

"You know those letters I have to write, making amends?"

"Uh-huh…"

"Well, I wrote one to his Mom, and she just emailed me with this pretty tetchy 'thanks' and 'Minneapolis.'"

"So maybe _she's _in Minneapolis."

"His parents live in Tokyo," Jim said. According to the blog, they had just moved to a new apartment in Tokyo too, and she'd started a new job teaching English to university students. "She's not in Minneapolis, no way."

"So…what? So he's in Minneapolis? What now?"

"Sulu…you're _you_. You _must _know someone who could find him."

"I _also _don't really think that's a good idea. Not yet."

"Sulu, _please_. I don't know how long he's going to _be _there. What if he decides to leave? Or even the US? I'll have lost _any _chance of making amends if he leaves the _country_ – I can't follow him to Japan!"

He heard a heavy, gusty sigh. "Jim…"

"Sulu, _please_. I'm begging you here. I'm _begging_."

"Jim, you drank again on the fifth. That's, what, three weeks ago? Not your greatest track record."

"I know. Sulu, I know, but _please_. This may be the only chance I get. She's _never _going to give me anything more than that – she hates my _guts_."

"If I was Spock's Mom, I'd probably hate your guts too."

"C'mon, Sulu, _please_…"

"Oh for the love of…!" he heard, followed by a very unmanly squeal and then suddenly he had Janice on the phone. "Facebook."

"Open."

"Search 'Gaila Vro' – V-R-O."

"…Red-haired chick with, ah, impressive…?"

"Yes. Private message."

"Okay…"

"Just this: 'I need your help re: location. Referred by Jan Rand.' Nothing else. Send."

"Okay, done."

"You'll hear from her in about an hour or so. She social networks constantly. Now _fuck off_, Jim, some of us are trying to _sleep_!"

She hung up on him, but for all her grouchiness, he could have kissed her.

Not an hour later, he had a friend request from Gaila Vro waiting in his inbox.

* * *

><p>On the third of January, Mr. Barnett called Jim out of the stockroom with a funny look on his face, and pushed him out into the parking lot.<p>

"Some chick looking for you," he said. "I hope you haven't gotten yourself into more trouble, Jimmy."

"Er…" Jim shrugged helplessly and stepped out into the frigid chill, to find a young woman in a very fashionable, well-cut coat leaning against a flash car that definitely wasn't designed for the snowy, empty roads of rural Iowa.

The red curls gave it away.

"Gaila?"

"Hey, Jimmy," she beamed and hugged him, despite the fact that, apart from her friend request and his initial message, they had never spoken or met before. "Jan told me where to find you – a store, Jimmy? Really? I had you pegged as the cars and sports type."

"Used to be a mechanic," Jim shrugged, worrying at his lower lip. "No offence, but why are you here?"

"Because I need _details_, honey," she shrugged. "Jan didn't give me much to go on, really, so…!" she whipped out a sparkly pen and notebook. "Lemme check the spelling," she showed him Spock's name. "Right spelling?"

"Yes."

"Weird name."

"He's half-Japanese."

"So he's an immigrant?"

"Er, I think so," Jim blinked. "He must be – he's from Tokyo."

"When did he come over?"

"Late nineties."

"Anything more helpful that than would be great."

"Well, for college, so probably…1998. Maybe."

"It'll do," she muttered, scribbling away. "Fluent in English, though?"

"Yes."

"What did he do?"

"He was a lawyer. He worked in Iowa City, dealing with corporate law; he'd just gotten promoted so he could start handling his own cases."

"But he still worked for firms?"

"Yes."

"And he's how old?"

"Thirty."

"So he will be for a while," she muttered almost to herself. "Any family over here?"

"No."

"Probably living alone, then, working in a law office, speciality corporate, half-Japanese and immigrant…" she was definitely muttering to herself. "1998 – did he not have citizenship?"

"No," Jim said firmly. "He was a Japanese citizen."

"Ooh, now that makes it easier," her eyes lit up. "He'll be on a government database somewhere, and they're so _poorly _protected, so…no problem, Jimmy. Give me a week – maybe more if that cute Russian in the flat below mine decides to figure out what to do with himself," she winked. "I'm such a cradle-snatcher. See you, Jimmy!"

And she was gone, the flash car peeling out of the parking lot with obnoxious ease considering the weather, and Jim was left standing in the cold like a complete idiot – and wondering exactly what kind of friends Janice had.

* * *

><p>Tuesday was the first post-Christmas meeting in Kalona, and Jim sat silently through almost everyone confessing that they had slipped up over the holiday period, and many venting their frustrations at the Christmas period and all that it entailed while they were at it.<p>

"Something on your mind, Jim?" McCoy asked as the group gathered their things to go, and Jim shrugged.

"I…I might be able to call Spock soon," he said. "Hell. I might be able to _see _him – face-to-face. Properly _talk _to him."

"Oh?"

"Mm," Jim shifted. "I'm shit scared," he blurted out, and McCoy smirked.

"You should be. That's a big step. You sure you're ready for it?"

"Yeah," Jim breathed. "Yeah, I'm ready. I've been writing my letter to him over and over and over – it's the longest thing I've ever written. I want to get everything in there."

"And if it doesn't go well?" McCoy asked gently.

"Then I'll deserve it," Jim muttered. "I still think he'd be crazy to take me back, no matter how much I love him. I can't change what I did, and he shouldn't forgive me for what I did. But I do need to say I'm sorry. As long as he doesn't…shoot me on the doorstep, then…"

"Are you going to call him first, or just show up on his doorstep?" McCoy asked. "'Cause, yeah, if you just show up, then he can't duck out of it, but Jim, that's probably just going to set him on edge. He might just not listen to you if you do that."

Jim paused. "Shit…I hadn't thought of that."

"Does he live somewhere you can get a hotel?"

"Sure – Minneapolis."

"Okay," McCoy said slowly. "So why don't you try booking a hotel, other side of the city from him, and call him from there, and arrange to meet somewhere neutral. You just show up on his doorstep, he's going to be damn uncomfortable."

"That's…that's a good idea," Jim muttered, rubbing at his forehead. "I just…I just didn't think about that at all."

"Take it from someone who's done it all before – it won't go well if you just turn up outta the blue. Especially, Jim, if you consider that he might well have no idea that you've been trying to sort yourself out."

"Good point."

"And Jim, what are you going to do if he's moved on?"

Every muscle in Jim's body seized up as though he'd received an electric shock. _Moved on_. Oh God. He had never even _considered_ that possibility. It had simply _never _occurred to him that Spock might have found somebody else in the last near-as-damn-it year – and it should have! It _should _have occurred to him, but…but it hadn't. He had simply assumed that he hadn't – but what if he turned up, and somebody else answered the door? That better guy that Spock deserved? That guy that would treat him right – or worse, that guy that wouldn't? What if Spock had someone else, and even Jim's apologies were worthless in his new life?

"As much as you keep saying you're just going to apologise, that's still going to hurt like hell if he has moved on," McCoy prodded quietly.

"Shit," Jim breathed.

"You have to be prepared for that, Jim. It's been, what, a year?"

Jim nodded mutely.

"It's entirely possible he's moved on, even if you haven't. New place, new people, and newly single…"

"Spock isn't like that," Jim whispered.

"Doesn't have to be like anything. Just needs one of those new people to take an interest in _him _– just like you did in Iowa City."

"I-if..." Jim swallowed, "if he's moved on, then…then I'll let him go. I'll…I'll not try to change his mind, or…or win him over. If he's found some other guy who was less of a dick, then…then okay."

McCoy said nothing.

"And…and even if he hasn't but he tells me to leave, I will," Jim continued, a little firmer, clenching his jaw slightly. "I'll say my piece and I'll go. I won't…I won't push him. I won't push him this time."

* * *

><p>Two days later, an email from Gaila appeared in his inbox, containing no chatty prose but a simple set of facts: a name, an address along North 5th Avenue, Minneapolis, a workplace address in St. Paul – and the most important phone number Jim thought he'd ever seen.<p> 


	15. 5th May 2007

**Notes: Porn ahead. Wet porn. And then damp porn.**

* * *

><p><em>5th May 2007<em>

Jim locked the front door, checked all the windows were closed and locked, and switched off the lights as he headed upstairs, careful not to trip on the bags neatly lined up in the hall. The shower was running, and lights that he didn't need were on, and he was grinning like a total idiot by the time he'd closed the bedroom door behind him.

He stripped inelegantly quickly and slipped into the ensuite as quietly as possible, successfully opening the shower door before Spock realised that he was there, and pushing him back against the tiles in a hungry, possessive kiss when he turned to question Jim's presence.

They didn't speak, bar the odd hiss of breath, as Jim wrapped one hand around their cocks and pressed the other into Spock to make him squirm and gasp quietly the way he only did if he was fingered. They exchange rough, wet kisses, nipping and biting, until Jim had worked three fingers into Spock and breathing became too important to have interfered with. Jim latched onto that long, pale neck as he turned Spock around and finally spoke.

"Fuck, you're fucking _here_," he groaned, and pushed in with one sharp stab, wrapping one arm around Spock's ribs when he cried out, biting along the top of his shoulder to distract him. "Okay? Okay?"

"Y-yes. _Yes_."

They didn't speak again, the shower filling with the hiss of the spray and the soft groans of both men as Jim moved, Spock's biceps flexing as he supported both their weight, Jim's hands and mouth preoccupied with his upper body until his rhythm began to falter and he thrust harder, one hand coming down to pull Spock along with him.

When Spock's spine snapped straight as though he'd just developed whiplash, he tightened impossibly around Jim, and Jim's lust exploded into a bone-rattling orgasm, his last thrusts milking every bit of pleasure that he could before he groaned heavily and pulled out.

"_Fuck_," he mumbled into Spock's shoulder. "S'rry. J'st…fuck, couldn't help myself."

"I do not…believe that an apology is required," Spock murmured, his chest heaving.

"Not that," Jim snickered into the back of Spock's shoulder, his hand stroking idly over that wet, smooth abdomen. "No condom."

Spock said nothing, but his head rolled back onto Jim's shoulder.

"You don't mind?" Jim murmured, sucking a kiss into his exposed throat.

"No," Spock replied tiredly, twisting their fingers together on his stomach.

Jim turned him around and kissed him, soft and gentle and nipping, almost butterfly kisses, parting his lips only to dart back again, until Spock groaned and drew him into a deep, languishing kiss and ceased the game.

"Love you," Jim breathed around the kiss, and sucked on Spock's tongue to prevent a reply before withdrawing. "M'glad you're here."

"As am I," Spock murmured, kissing Jim's shoulder before resting his head there. "I am tired, however. It has been a long day."

"Sleep in Sunday," Jim said, shutting off the shower and disentangling them before he stepped out and reached for the pile of towels by the sink. He was more accustomed to the chill of this particular bathroom, and so shook out a bath sheet to wrap around both of them, reeling Spock back in for another long kiss. "And Monday. Oh my God, you're going to be here Monday morning. And Tuesday."

"And all week," Spock agreed sagely, wrapping his arms around Jim's shoulders and opting to use the left as a pillow. "But if I do not get to a bed in the next ten minutes, I _will _spend the first night on this floor."

"Nuh-uh," Jim chuckled, beginning to rub the towel over that pale back. "Can't have that. It's your bed too. Shit, we christened the shower but not the bed."

"Sunday morning," Spock murmured drowsily.

Jim snickered. "I'll hold you to that. Literally. Hey, let's buy the _Kama Sutra _and work through it and the house at the same time."

Spock made a vague noise that was completely incomprehensible and Jim took the hint, steering him into the bedroom and dropping him onto the bed before going to put the towel in the hamper. When he returned, crawling over Spock to kiss him, his libido sat up and took notice again when Spock lifted and drew his heels to his hips, allowing Jim's lower body to fall between his legs.

"Again?" Jim grinned at the sleepy, thoroughly contented expression he was given. "Sure?"

"Condom," Spock murmured, and, "Wet spot," by way of explanation. Jim wasn't going to question that (after all, he was getting an unexpected second round, so the condom was a very, _very _small sacrifice) and was hard as a rock in sheer anticipation even before he got his hand into the bedside drawer.

"You're spoiling me," he said and Spock just graced him with that amazing calm. "You still loose enough?"

"Mm."

He was: Jim slid home almost too easily, and he sighed at the heat. Spock's sleepy serenity was infectious, and the pace Jim set was more of an idle undulation than truly thrusting. He pressed light kisses and murmurs to whatever inches of Spock's skin he could reach, rewarded with quiet sighs and half-smiles and the occasional flutter of steady, gentle fingers at his face and hair. The soft groan that Spock permitted when Jim's hand closed over his cock was shocking in the quiet gentleness of the event, and Jim's orgasm took him by surprise, washing through him like an ocean wave rather than crashing through in electric power as it usually did. When Spock followed him, he sighed his pleasure into Jim's kiss, his body curving up to meet his before relaxing back bonelessly into the mattress.

"I love you," Jim whispered, the words ghosting over Spock's cheekbone, and he was graced with a half-smile, beautiful in its shyness and peace, before the dark eyes fell and he was gone.


	16. The Phone Call

**Notes: And finally, a _looooong _way in: Spock shows up. (Sorta.)**

* * *

><p><em>The Phone Call<em>

It was, at the best of times, five hours to Minneapolis. After an accident on the highway, and the longest damn queue for gas Jim had ever seen at the state line, it was more like six and a half by the time he pulled up in front of the hotel he'd randomly pulled off the net.

He had managed to bargain the whole week off from Kevin at work in exchange for taking the week that Kevin's girlfriend would be back from college for the April break. He had figured that he might need a week to get over this – or negotiate.

He had taken his bike, a backpack of clean clothes, and his netbook and phone – and nothing else. He hadn't dared take his cards in case it all went horribly wrong and he used the three hundred dollars on his credit card just to buy a shitload of booze and drink himself to death in the hotel room. Which would just be fucking _embarrassing _on his death certificate, and put all of this tension and struggle down to absolutely fuck all.

He might have been successful (so far) in resisting the temptation of _just one beer_, but he was absolutely fucking useless when it came to the piece of paper burning a hole in his jacket pocket, on which he'd written down the address and phone number that Gaila had sent him. He had stared at it religiously in the two weeks since she'd handed the details over, and had them perfectly memorised – and the directions from the hotel.

Why, he didn't know. Why he'd even looked up the directions, he didn't know. McCoy was right – a neutral place would be best, not just showing up on Spock's doorstep – but he'd memorised the directions anyway – and temptation was much more powerful when it concerned Spock.

He reached the hotel and, almost without thinking about it, turned the bike to follow those long-since memorised directions.

Of course, memorising Google Maps and actually following said directions is a little more difficult, so the fifteen-minute proposed journey ended up being an hour of trawling slowly through what appeared to be the world's largest housing estate. And once he thanked God for showing him where North Fifth Avenue was, he then cursed the same God for making it so fucking _long_. And apparently Minnesotan people didn't believe in putting numbers on their houses. 'Cause, you know, that would be jerky, showing people _which fucking number house they were at_.

And then…

And then suddenly he was there.

It was the middle of _January_, and the bike had been complaining about the state of the roads for _hours_, and it was fucking _cold_ (and holy shit, if you were from rural Iowa and could say it was cold _then you fucking knew it was cold_!) and the sky was leering at him, obviously in some weird meteorological debate about whether to add more snow to his issues, but…

But…

Spock's house was a small, one-storey…box, for lack of a better word. It had a fair spread of neat lawn around it, punctuated every now and then by ugly ornamental bushes that made Jim hope that he rented the place, and an ugly link fence that marked it off from the neighbouring boxes and ugly ornamental bushes. The mailbox had a dent in it, and the front door was flaking off its own-upon-a-time-green paint, and the window seemed to have completely ordinary white blinds cutting off the room from the outside world. The paintwork of the whole box was flaking, never mind the door, and the front path was cracked and in need of re-laying. There were dead leaves in the gutters, frozen from the weather, and a neat row of icicles hung from both of the front windows, like rows of tiny glittering teeth just waiting for Jim to _dare _breaking in.

Spock wouldn't _be _there.

He would be at work. It was three o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday – kids were beginning to flourish along the icy sidewalks – so Spock would be at work. His office was all the way across in St. Paul – Jim was nowhere physically near him.

But he felt it.

Spock came home to this box every day. There was a dead weed poking up through the crack in the front path; did he step over it in his neat office shoes? Did he still wear those black leather assassin gloves that Jim had bought him for their first anniversary, and then persuaded him to model in bed? Did the inside of the box smell of Earl Grey and cinnamon; did its kitchen (or kitchenette, it was so small) shimmer in a kind of warmth permanently leftover from endless pots of stew and stir-fry. Was there a clean, dust-free wok hanging on the wall?

Did he have _pictures_?

Jim's house was still covered in their pictures; hell, it was still covered in Spock's things. Anyone would walk in and think Spock still lived there. His hiking boots were still on the mat in the hall. And his pictures, his photos, lined every available surface, like the house was just a huge shrine to him.

Did Spock have any pictures? He'd had a memory stick at work full of them – Jim was his background on his computer. But had he retrieved it when he'd left? And if he had, had he printed them out and made them into pictures and stuck them around his box? Or had he torn them up, sworn to forget Jim's face, sworn to forget _Jim_?

Did someone _else _live in that box, too? Or visit? Did some other man visit Spock at the weekends like Jim used to do? Had the neighbours been treated to an eyeful when this other guy kissed him on the front porch? Did the other guy try to talk him into learning to ice-skate; did the other guy _succeed _where Jim had failed?

Some of the gathering kids were giving Jim funny looks, so he shifted and put the bike in gear and left the box behind.

He didn't realise he'd been crying until he got back to the hotel, and a mirror, and realised exactly how shit he must have looked – and how insane.

How utterly, utterly insane.

* * *

><p>Spock's key jammed in the lock for a long, frustrating minute before his door granted him permission to enter, and he was hard-pressed not to swear.<p>

It had not been the best of days. He had not liked winters in Iowa, but winters in Minnesota were infinitely worse. The office had been uncomfortably cold all day, and then the IT technician had spontaneously decided to 'upgrade' the computer system, resulting in massive losses of data and said technician being called into the main office to fix the problem – which meant loud, obnoxious Scottish singing for the entire morning. Miss Kalomi's unborn child had then decided to rectify that status, and there had been utter chaos as she had almost delivered the child by the photocopier. And to round off a spectacularly unproductive _waste _of a day, Professor Crater had come into the office to see his lawyer, and spent an hour loudly damning every single procedure of the entire _state_. He had only stopped short of the entire USA because said lawyer wisely opted to remove him from the office floor in case someone – quite possibly Spock – finally lost it and stabbed him to death with a stapler. (Which would then probably result in being fired for misuse of company property.)

Spock did not have the patience to do battle with his door.

His house was at least warm, and the tension in the base of his back began to unknot. He puttered through his routine with no emotion: shower, change of clothes, reheated leftovers for dinner that had little to no taste, and sitting on his meditation mat in the lotus position to watch the evening news before an hour poorly attempting to sort his thoughts and feelings out. It would not work, and then he would retire.

Spock was no fool: he _knew _that he was depressed. But he quite simply did not have the urge to do anything about it.

His life was satisfactory. He was relatively well-paid. He had a roof over his head, sufficient savings to pay for his heating costs to ward off the January freeze, and a reliable stockpile of various foods in the house. His colleagues were somewhat irritating at times, but generally pleasant enough people. His boss was not a psychopath, an incompetent, or a liar. He could generally afford the luxuries that he was not meant to desire in the first place. Judging by the way the bookstore assistant looked at him on a Saturday afternoon, he could establish a romantic relationship with relative ease.

Yet his quality of life – his _happiness _– had slipped.

Apparently nothing was happening in the entire world, for the news channel opted to pollute his day further with a piece on an ice-skating great-grandmother in Michigan, and Spock turned the television off in poorly-muted distaste.

Meditation did not come easily – it had not for weeks, and the reason was simple. In a few days, it would be an entire year since Spock had left – left _Jim _– and his mind was taking every opportunity to remind him of the fact. Clearing his irritation at his poor day would only leave more room for the crushing loneliness to spread out over his limbs and paralyse him in a blank, black wave that reminded him powerfully of those shaky years of his youth, and the gentle gleam of Tokyo sunsets off razor blades.

He did not want to think of it, and yet he seemingly had no choice.

He had never expected this. His father had been married before, and had barely remembered his former wife's name, never mind thought about her. And perhaps it was because he had found better companionship in Spock's mother – but how could he possibly hope to find better companionship than the man he had fallen for in the winter of 2005? It was simply not possible – he could _not _do better than Jim Kirk, and yet he would have been destroyed had he stayed where he was.

Spock took a deep breath, and abandoned the meditation attempt. His breathing was shaky, and his eyes felt itchy from the tears he had ruthlessly suppressed. This was futile. Things were not going to change, and he needed desperately to find some way of truly _coping _with the situation.

The phone rang, obscenely loud in the silence of the house.

It would be his mother, most likely, and he took another breath to calm his respiration and steady his voice before answering with a flat, formal, "Spock Grayson."

"Um…" a man's voice almost stuttered. Spock frowned; it was ridiculous to think that a vague hum could sound familiar, but it did.

"Who is this?" he asked.

The man hung up, and the dial tone whined in Spock's ears. He frowned and replaced the receiver – a prank call that someone had ducked out of, clearly, or a very embarrassed wrong number – and was halfway towards the bedroom door when it rang again. Suppressing an annoyed sigh, Spock answered it again.

"Who is this?" he repeated firmly.

This time, he got an answer – and it buckled his knees until he found himself, quite by surprise, sitting on the couch.

"It's Jim."


	17. Back and Forth

**Notes: Rapid update! I'm also another year older today. I'd say I can drink, but I'm English and have been able to legally drink for a while now ;)**

* * *

><p><em>Back and Forth<em>

The cafe was a small warm haven from the Minnesotan winter that smelt of strong coffee and not-so-strong eggs. It was quiet when Jim arrived, hovering between the morning rush of workers wanting breakfasts, and the lunchtime rush of the same, although Jim wouldn't know whether cafes were busier on Saturdays or not.

He had barely managed to choke out a very stilted, awkward invite for coffee, with the age-old 'we need to talk' stuttered around a thick tongue, and had waited for fourteen beats of the human heart (he'd counted) for Spock to agree. That was all Spock had said: "Alright." Jim had named the venue, and the time, and now sat fidgeting, hands clamping around a mug of tea and wondering whether it would be too weird to order one for Spock too.

The cafe door opened, and Jim realised his error.

In all his scheming and planning and _figuring out how this was meant to go_, he'd never figured what the very sight of Spock – after almost a year, _fuck_, a year on _Monday _– was going to do to him. He had walked out on the eighteenth, and was walking back in – however briefly – on the sixteenth, and...

And the image was shocking.

At first glance, he looked very much the same – same haircut, same blank expression, same style of dress – and even as he approached Jim's table, he was the same man who had walked out of the front door a year ago.

Except...

Except he wasn't.

Jim noticed the way he walked first. Spock didn't walk; he would _stride_. He commanded his body and its action; he walked with speed and purpose and _intent_, graceful but primed like a guided missile. He had never dawdled or window-shopped or strolled unless Jim had clung onto his arm or his waist to _make _him – and even then, Jim would find himself striding. Spock didn't _walk _anywhere – he never had, as long as Jim had known him. He could be moving through four feet of snow, and he'd still be _striding_.

But as Spock approached the table, he walked. He didn't stride; he walked slowly and stiffly, as though he'd pulled a muscle recently, and sank into his chair awkwardly and without any of his usual grace.

It wasn't just the walk, either; when he folded his hands on the tabletop, they were leaner. His face was exactly the same, and under the layers, Jim couldn't tell if he'd lost weight, but there was a distinct tension he was carrying in his shoulders that he never had in...

No.

No, that wasn't quite right. He'd carried that tension in those last few months.

"Hey," Jim whispered.

The waitress appeared – Minneapolis was _weird_, because she was smartly dressed and thirty years old if a day and wasn't chewing gum or flirting, and Spock ordered a large tea in a low monotone that was both a balm and a curse on Jim's hearing.

They said nothing until Spock's tea arrived; in those minutes, Jim stared at every inch of that missed face and wondered how in the hell he was meant to even begin. When the cup landed on the table, and Jim caught a breath of Earl Grey, a yawning hole opened in his chest for what he'd lost – no, what he'd forced out of his life – and he suddenly _longed _to just lean over the table and kiss him.

"So, um..." Jim desperately tried to break the ominous silence. "How have you been?"

"Adequate," came the clipped reply, and Jim openly winced.

"Yeah, okay, so fuck the small talk. Got it," he rambled, then ran both hands through his hair and leaned forward to rest both arms firmly on the plastic table. "Do you mind if I just...talk for a minute? Just...try and...explain?"

Spock eyed him for a moment before picking up his mug, leaning back in his chair with both hands wrapped around the heat, and nodded once.

"I'm an alcoholic," Jim blurted out, and one dark eyebrow rose minutely. "I know. You already knew that, but I didn't. I wouldn't listen. But I...I've listened since. I ran out of rice," he chuckled darkly. "I ran out of rice and I just caved to Sulu's pressure then and went to these meetings in Kalona, and there was a guy who ran it, who'd gotten a real nasty divorce, and I just thought...fuck, I'm this fucking pathetic and he can sort himself out. So why couldn't I? So...so I did."

The other eyebrow rose, and Spock serenely took a sip of tea as though Jim were describing his favourite book.

"I know, I make it sound too easy," Jim muttered. "It wasn't. It _isn't_. The last time I had a drink...our anniversary. Should have been our fifth. That was the last time. I vowed then I was off, for good, and I haven't drunk a drop since. And it's...it's been hard, it's been fucking _hard_, but..."

"Do you expect sympathy?" Spock interrupted coolly.

"No!" Jim blurted out, and dropped his face to stare at the tabletop. "No. No, I don't. I don't expect anything from you. Nothing. I just...all the way through this, it was about you. It was about...about us and how...and what I did. That was why. All the way through I thought, I have to explain. I have to say I'm sorry. And I am. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for all of it – the cheating and the arguments and the shouting and the...the eighteenth."

When he glanced up, Spock was staring at him unreadably over the top of the mug of tea.

"I'm sorry for taking you for granted, and taking advantage of you, and I'm sorry for everything nasty I ever said or did, and I swear to you, I swear to anything you want me to, I'm never going to drink again. _Never_."

"You made that promise once before," Spock noted expressionlessly.

Jim winced. "I know. But...this time I mean it? I know that sounds so stupid and you have no reason to trust me, but...but I do. I'm sorting everything out. I fixed up the house proper – cleaned it out and fixed all the broken shit, Janice just about had a heart attack – and in the spring I'm going to start work on the garden. You...you left your plans for it behind in the study."

Spock said nothing.

"And I'm going to stay sober and get back on track and...and I want to get back to being that guy that asked you out in your office in front of that cow of a receptionist," Jim rambled, then shook his head. "I'm not asking you to come back with me. You'd be fucking stupid to take me back..."

"Yes."

"...and I can't – _won't _– ask you to, but...I needed, I really needed, to tell you that I'm sorry, and if there's anything I can do to make it up to you, to...to make you stop hating me, then..."

Spock made a faint noise, sitting forward to put his mug on the table, and Jim's eyes snapped back up to meet his.

"What?" Jim croaked around a swollen throat.

"You are in error."

"I...am?"

"Yes. I do not hate you, Jim, and therein lies the problem."

It took a moment for Jim to process that – and its implications – and he took a short, sharp breath when he did. "You still...?"

"Yes."

"But...but _why_?"

"If I knew, then I would quite likely be able to _stop_ loving you," Spock said flatly. "As it is, I seem incapable. If I did not love you, I would not have stayed as long as I did, and I would not have agreed to meet you. It was simply not possible to _refuse_."

The lump in Jim's throat swelled and he nearly choked. "Oh my God," he breathed around it, shaking his head. "I'm so sorry. You...all this time while I've been such a fucking idiot, you've..."

"Yes."

"Spock," Jim breathed, leaning forward earnestly and trying to catch his eye. "_Please_. Is there anything I could do? _Anything_?"

Spock paused, before tilting his head and saying slowly: "If I may...'just talk'...for a moment?"

"S-sure."

"I...never envisaged our relationship ending," Spock said flatly. "I always believed that we could...work it out, simply because we loved each other. But I was mistaken – and if that was not enough, then what could possibly resurrect any semblence of a relationship between us? And without that relationship, it is simply too painful to be in your presence because against all my better judgement and efforts, I do still love you."

It had never hurt so _much_ to be told that somebody loved you.

"It would be wholly unwise to resume any relationship with you after the rather spectacular failure that was our previous attempt, particularly in the light of the fact that I simply cannot trust your promises, particularly on this matter."

There was a long silence, and Jim eventually leaned over to begin rummaging through the battered rucksack that had been seemingly attached to him in public while they had dated. After a moment, he set a thick envelope on the table between them, with Spock's name scrawled on the front in Jim's untidy hand.

"I had a backup plan," he admitted, "in case you wouldn't agree to see me. I mean, I didn't expect you to actually agree, so...anyway. I've been writing that letter for...fuck, _weeks_. I've probably said it all better there than I have in here, but...but here's the thing. This time...this time it's real. I'm done. I'm done with the drinking and the cheating and the being a complete prick. With _everyone_, not just you. And I know you can't trust me, and you can't take my word for it, but...Spock, I'm _begging _you here, just...take a _really _small leap of faith for me?"

"To what end?" came the sharp reply.

"I don't even know," Jim whispered, "but I can't prove I'm sorry – really _prove _it – unless you let me, can I? I mean, you can't trust me and...and I can't _prove _it, and...and shit, Spock I need to! I need to prove it because I fucked up so bad, so bad with you and I'm going to be paying for that for the rest of my life, and the rest of my life would be...and...and you're wrong."

Spock's eyebrows rose.

"About...about love not being enough, because I've come this far because I love you," Jim breathed. "If I didn't love you so much, I would never have sorted myself out. I'd still be the drunk, abusive _dick _that hurt you, and I'm not. I'm not, and I'm not because I still love you. Even when you were gone, I..." he cut himself off, staring into the middle-distance a moment, then groaned. "Oh fuck, I swore I wouldn't do this."

Spock stared at him warily, and Jim – very daringly – lay his hands out on the table so that the tips of their fingers were brushing.

"If we still love each other," Jim breathed, "and...and the problem that drove us apart is being taken care of, then...then maybe one day we could...get back to...to the way we were in the beginning? To...to _us_?"

The blank expression shifted to outright shock, and Jim let out a long breath that seemed to hang in the air, waiting for some kind of reply.

"What if...what if we...tried again?"


	18. 25th December 2007

**Notes: _Double_ update. Because I love you guys. And because it's my birthday, I have a contract under negotiation that's going well, and I'm meeting up for (I admit it, _more_) drinks later. **

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><p><em>25th December 2007<em>

"It's snowing!" someone shouted – probably one of Janice's excitable colleagues – and suddenly the general calm and well-fed hedonism that had decided over the party promptly died and was replaced with general excitement and a flurry of adults seizing coats and gloves like small children.

In less than two minutes, a snowball fight – the last of many throughout the last three days – erupted in Sulu's road, with the host himself taking far too much pleasure in pelting his new girlfriend with iceballs, and the formerly tipsy-but-dignified adults were replaced by loud, overgrown children.

Jim was an opportunist, and took it.

He had spent most of the party watching in no small amount of annoyance as one of Janice's colleagues, a teacher by the name of Kyle (although whether it was his first or last name, Jim didn't know or care) diligently chatted up Spock for the entire evening, being generally very interesting and very charming and very in the personal space that only Jim was allowed to invade, thank you very much. And Jim had spent the entire evening trying to be good – not drinking too much, mingling with the other guests and befriending the new people, not punching Kyle in the face and dragging Spock back home like a caveman for wild, rampant, jealous sex…okay, maybe later.

But Spock was not interested in snowball fights (he didn't seem to grasp the idea, and he found the cold unbearable) so while he had drifted out onto the front porch to watch the others, he was not participating.

Jim saw his chance, and pounced, bounding back up out of the snow onto the porch with too much energy and wrapping both arms around Spock's waist, reeling him in expertly and meeting no resistance.

"Hello, you," he said, and kissed him in the soft light from the outdoor lanterns on the porch railing. Spock melted into him, one hand coming up to cup the back of Jim's head and the other wrapping around his shoulder to pull their chests together until they touched from their knees to their lips.

Kissing in the snow was not especially romantic – it was cold, and Spock was shivering so Jim's tongue was in danger, and their layers meant there wasn't a lot of groping to be had, and their noses kept brushing and they were _icy _– but Jim didn't especially care.

"Fucking lovebirds!" someone – probably Sulu – yelled, and Jim very casually flipped them all off without breaking contact or opening his eyes. A silent chuckle hitched Spock's chest for a brief second, but he made no sound and no attempt to end the kiss, bar a warning nip to Jim's lower lip as an instruction to behave.

He tasted of chocolate cake and red wine, the pink colour clinging to his lips until Jim sucked it off, warm and enticing and better than actual red wine or actual chocolate cake would have been. He tasted of tea, that permanent lingering touch that endless cups of various teas had left imprinted forever on the roof of his mouth, and Jim was skilled enough by now to know, when he scraped his tongue along said roof, that the latest cup had been Assam. He tasted faintly of toothpaste, drowned under the red wine from the party, but still lingering at the corners of his jaw and the seams of his mouth, sparking off against Jim's tongue at almost random intervals. He tasted of soap in the cracks of his lips, and the faint trace of shaving cream on the skin around them, and a hint of orange clung to the inside of his lower lip when Jim bit down on it, leftover from breakfast that morning. And most of all, he tasted _familiar _– Jim had noticed all these things before, all the little clashes and overridden things, all the blends and mixes that decorated their kissing, the telling of a story of a day and a life and a _man _wrapped up in a single sense, and opened up and read and investigated in a single action. He tasted of _them_, and it was a drunken, dizzy feeling.

Then a snowball smashed into Jim's _ear_ and the spell was very rudely broken.

"Fucktard!" he yelled at a cackling Sulu.

Spock said nothing, stepping down off the porch into nearly two feet of snow and bending at the waist to gather some into his hands.

"Don't say I didn't warn you!" Janice shouted.

"_Shit_," Sulu said – and like a rabbit staring into the headlights, stayed perfectly still as Spock executed a powerful over-arm throw and nearly broke his nose with the most perfectly compacted snowball Jim had ever seen.

"Are you _sure _you didn't have snowball fights in Tokyo?" Jim asked, snickering helplessly and leaning down over the railing to kiss him again.

"I am sure," Spock said, hauling himself up to stand on the edge of the railing, feet between the slats, both hands clamped on the top rail to keep himself from falling. "I simply do not like being interrupted."

Jim grinned, cupping his face in both hands firmly. "Okay," he said, and kissed him again, feeling almost giddy with it, like a teenager with a crush too big for his heart, like a kid with a love too overwhelming to truly understand – like a man in love, truly in love, for the first time.

It was too cold to be kissing outside and standing still. They were both shivering, and their tongues were in danger, and their layers and positions over the railing allowed for no groping – and yet it was the best kiss Jim could ever remember having, the best _feeling _he could ever remember having.

This time, when Sulu whistled at them and a snowball flew past inches from Spock's head, he was wholly ignored.


	19. Jim's Letter

**Notes: In which Spock reads the letter that Jim wrote for him. Also, LJ's being a dick to me so this chapter isn't up there yet. Bastards.**

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><p><em>Jim's Letter<em>

_Dear Spock,_

_I've put this letter together out of little bits and pieces I've written to you ever since I found out that a lot of alcoholics write letters to the people they hurt in order to apologise. I never wrote a full letter until I worked out where you were, but tonight I sat down and put it all together. I've been here four hours now, but I think I've finally put everything in that I wanted to say – so here goes._

_First of all, I still love you. I still love you as much as I did on our first anniversary, and our second, and even our third and fourth. I still love you with my entire heart and soul and maybe I'm never going to go wearing my heart on my sleeve and singing your name from the rooftops, but it's true all the same. Maybe I'll only ever make big declarations like this in writing, but it doesn't make them any less true. I still love you with everything that I have and everything that I am._

_When you walked out of that door, you took things with you. My libido. My sanity. My hope. My stability. And the biggest one: my heart. My heart followed you out of my life. When you left, I felt like I'd lost everything – and really, I had. Yeah, I still had a house and I managed to get another job and I still had friends – but I didn't have you, and you were my life. You still are, really._

_I can admit it now: I am an alcoholic. I've been sober since the fifth of December, 2010. We both know what that date should have been. I broke down and bought a load of wine bottles, but I only drank one. I smashed the rest up and swore I'd never drink again – and so far, so good. But it wasn't pretty._

_I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't seek help the minute you left. I was terrified and guilty and inappropriately angry. I'm not angry any more because you did the right thing, completely the right thing. Really, looking back, you should have walked out before it ever got to that point – but you didn't, and that unswerving loyalty in the face of everything I did just breaks my heart._

_I should have faced up to the problem sooner. I should have listened when you tried to get me to cut back, even before I was fired. I cheated on you several times, I shouted at you, I hit you, and in the end, I attacked you in a drunken rage – but I wouldn't admit I had a problem until the night you walked out, even though I'd been drunk every single time._

_Honestly, I wouldn't face it until later._

_But the fact is, you know all that. What I really want to do is try to explain because there's some things I'm never quite sure that you got. Neither of us were really into talking about how we felt, but looking back, I can't help but wonder that if we had talked sometimes - just now and then - about how we were really doing, we might not have gone so far._

_When I lost my job, I don't think you really understood how inferior I felt. Until then, I'd always been this strong, capable guy who could look out for you and support you and throw money into our trips for your birthday every fall. You were this stunning, gorgeous, brilliant guy but you know what? I could have you, because I was able to provide for you and we could go places and I could treat you, and...you always made me feel a million dollars. I could take you out to restaurants and I felt like every guy and girl in the place would kill to be in my chair, and I'd kill to keep my chair._

_And then suddenly I was relying on your wages and not mine, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like I couldn't be that guy. I felt like a burden, and I have always hated feeling like that, never mind with you. I felt annoyed with myself, and it turned into being annoyed with you._

_You were just so capable. You were so much better than me – you always have been, but when you'd be out at work all day, then come home and do the laundry and start cooking, it felt like there was no point in me being around. You were just fine on your own; you didn't need me. And it was stupid of me, and I will always regret letting myself do it, but I started to resent you for that._

_So I would drink to forget that I resented you and if you didn't need me, eventually you'd figure that out and leave me – but that never really helped, did it? I've never been a great drunk as we both know very well, and when I was really trashed and you'd come home all pristine and perfect and so gorgeous it hurt, I hated myself for not being enough. And I'm just another stupid man because in hating myself, I'd lash out at you._

_And then you left, and when I realised that I'd lost the best thing that had ever happened to me, I just kind of lost it. Sulu had to take me to hospital four times in six months for alcohol poisoning. The weird thing is, even though I resented you for being too good for me, I never resented you for leaving. Once you were gone, all I could do was love you and feel so ashamed and unhappy and lost. I guess once you were gone, I couldn't be mad at you anymore, and then I forgot why the hell I'd been mad in the first place, and I just felt...empty. So I drank to forget that, too._

_Then one day I ran out of rice._

_It sounds really dumb, so let me explain. Ever since you started spending the weekend, I had a permanent supply of rice. To run out...it was like you'd died and the catalogues had finally stopped coming. I ran out of rice – so I went to my first meeting._

_It's been more or less an uphill struggle ever since, but I made it. I'd sit in every meeting with that picture of you Sulu took when he dragged us over to see his brand new car. Every time I fell off the wagon again, I'd take out all my pictures of you and think about what I'd fucked up, and why I was trying to get it all back together._

_And here's why: because you deserve to hear how much I fucked it up, and why it all went wrong, and how sorry I am, and how much it wasn't your fault. Because I know you – even after all of the shit, I know you – and I know how you would have been thinking: that it was something to do with you._

_Well, it's just like Omaha. It wasn't you. It was me. I'm not stupid: I know what was going on, now anyway. I had all these insecurities because, let's face it, Spock, you're fucking gorgeous. You're the most brilliant, beautiful man I've ever met and you could have anyone in the whole world – and how could I compete with that? What did I have to keep you around? When I lost my job, I felt like a burden – and I felt like eventually, you'd realise that too and you'd go off and find somebody better for you._

_Maybe you did – but I drove you out, and you were right to go. You should have gone earlier. I hurt you – not just physically, though I will always regret that – but emotionally and mentally as well. You've never been able to see just how amazing you really are, and all those awful things I said in the last few months is bound to have made that worse._

_But you are, you know. Amazing, that is. You were the best thing that ever happened to me by a very long way. I was in love with you from the moment you told me that basketball was only useful as a method of teaching people how to break their ankles with relative grace. Fourth date, at Fernando's. I remember almost all my moments with you, because they're all so important. All you had to do was smile at me, and whatever my boss or my brother or my bank had said just went ass-first out the window._

_I still love you. You've been gone nearly a year now – probably more than that by the time I get to see you – and I'm still just as ridiculously, hopelessly in love with you as I always was. I still dream about you, and I'm still reaching for your side of the bed when I wake up, and I brew a pot of Earl Grey at least once a week just to pretend you're home and just being quiet somewhere else in the house. Hell, it's still 'our house' to me, not mine, because when you were here, it was my home. I still have your things scattered around, and your pictures on the wall. If I was ever murdered, the cops would be looking for you too, because it looks like you still live here._

_Only, it's not home without you – it's just a house. Fuck, I grew up in this house, but without you, that's all it is. A lonely old house._

_Speaking of the house, I should tell you how much effort I've put in. I had to keep distracted from how much I wanted to drink, so I completely scrubbed it out and fixed it up. All the lightbulbs work, and I finally sorted out the dodgy pipe in the downstairs bathroom, and the porch railing is fixed. I'm getting the spare bedroom redecorated in the spring – Sulu and Janice are going to help out – and I'm going to fix up the garden too. You left your plans for it in the study. Even if you never see it, it'll be your garden._

_I got a new job about two months after you left, too, down at the store. I stack shelves for a living. It's not fixing cars, but it'll do. I'm still intent on reapplying to the garage when they get a new boss. Even if you tell me to fuck off, I'm still going to keep myself sorted out – because I owe it to you, and I owe it to me as well._

_See, the reason it worked is that the guy who runs the meetings I go to is this cranky doctor with a nasty divorce and a kid he never gets to see in Georgia. But he sorted himself out – he's been sober for years. He nearly slipped recently but he didn't – he's still fighting it, but he's winning. And I thought, you know, if he can sort it out, then so can I. My situation isn't nearly so bad as his – I didn't get kicked out of my house or my damn state, and I don't have a kid._

_But I can't quite say that I 'just' lost you, because it wasn't a just. It was like getting paralysed or having a limb cut off. Or ripped off._

_But I'm getting better. I'm getting there. I'm not an asshole anymore, and I'm not abusive – because I was, I'll admit that too – and I'm not a drunk and I'm not a cheater. Not anymore. I've sorted myself out, and I'll keep myself sorted if it kills me, no matter what._

_I wish I could honestly say I hope that you've found someone who treats you right, but a tiny part of me doesn't want that because that would mean you've moved on. And if you have, it's going to break my heart all over again because no matter how much I say I won't ask you for a second chance – and I won't, because agreeing to it would be the dumbest move you could make – but...but I'm only human. I do want you back, but I swear to you, I'm never going to push you into it. Hell, I won't even ask if I can help it._

_But believe me when I say that if you decide, completely freely, to give me that second chance, I will spend every moment of the rest of my life thanking you for that chance, and treating you the way you always deserved to be treated, and just...loving you. Loving you with everything that I have._

_My mind and my heart and my fucking soul belong to you. They always have. And no matter what you decide and no matter what the rest of your life has in store, please remember this: you are always loved. You are always, always loved, and you are completely deserving of it. You're a brilliant, amazing, gorgeous guy and I will regret every moment that I didn't treat you as such for the rest of my existence – no matter what your next move is._

_I am truly sorry, more than I can ever express, and I hope that one day you can forgive me and we'll both get over it, and we'll both be okay. Especially you. Even if we never get back together._

_But I still love you._

_Jim._

Spock folded the letter up again, and swallowed against the lump in his throat. It was dark; he should go to bed, and think on the matter further in the morning.

Instead, he leaned over and picked up the phone.


	20. The First Step

**Notes: Now we get to the messy bit. Remember, this is from Jim's POV; while his reasoning is all laid out for us, Spock's reasoning takes a little more digging. It'll turn up eventually - just not quite yet.**

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><p><em>The First Step<em>

"_Yo_."

"It's Jim," Jim blurted out, the moment Sulu answered the phone. He had fled back to the hotel after his lunchtime appointment with Spock, and called Sulu the moment he had arrived, too nervous to say seemingly isolated any longer. Not with a minibar in the hotel room. And even if he could only _talk _to Sulu, rather than watch really crappy gay soap operas and bitch about how distinctly unattractive the actors were, it would still be a small distraction.

"Jim? Aren't you in Min- oh shit, didn't it go well?"

He heard the background noise get suddenly muted, and realised that he really was missing out on a crap gay soap opera. And Sulu had put it on hold for him. He could have _kissed _him. (Maybe.)

"I dunno," Jim mumbled. "I mean...he didn't deck me or anything. Which, y'know, he would've had a right to."

"Right or not, I woulda come up there and decked him back."

"Yes, well, he didn't," Jim interrupted, before Sulu could get any manly ideas above his distinctly gay-and-girly station. Spock wasn't into brawling, but he _was _deceptively strong – and even if he wasn't, Sulu couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag without that fencing sword of his. Jim would have bet more money on his mother than Sulu.

"So, how did it go?"

"Well. He didn't deck me, or stab me, or shoot me. He didn't even swear at me, or bring along a boyfriend to do it all on his behalf. And he took my letter, so...I guess it went okay."

"But?" Sulu coaxed.

"There's no but."

Sulu snorted rudely. "There's totally a but, and don't dodge the issue by commenting on your fine ass."

Jim sighed heavily and flopped back to the pillows piled at the head of bed. "I just...I guess I thought once I'd managed to apologise, things would...get easier. Get _better_, but...he's still not here, and I'm still the jackass who drove him out, and..."

"And you're not back together?"

"Yeah," Jim mumbled, feeling the tears rising in the back of his throat.

"Jim..." Sulu hesitated, then said: "Maybe...maybe that's for the best."

"For his best, it is," Jim croaked. "But for mine? Shit, Sulu, I love him. I still love him. And I...I don't want to pressure or push – fuck, I didn't even mean to _ask_, but..."

"You _went ahead and asked_?" Fuck it if Sulu didn't sound like a teenage girl getting a juicy secret on someone else's breakup right about then. For once, Jim couldn't appreciate the octave his voice travelled through.

"Yeah." It was more of an incoherent rasp than a word.

"What did he say?"

"Said he still loved me, but," Jim's voice wavered uncertainly, "it would be fucking dumb to try picking up where we left off."

"He's right, you know."

"_I know_."

"But..."

"What?" Jim sniffled, and then felt disgusted with himself for _sniffling_. Jesus Christ.

"If he still loves you too, then maybe there is some hope," Sulu pushed. "I mean, if you're both still in love..."

"This isn't a fucking fairytale," Jim snapped. "After what I did? Jesus Christ, Sulu, he'd have to be stupid, and I don't _want _him to put himself at that kind of risk again, but..."

"But your head and your heart aren't agreeing with each other?"

Jim chuckled wetly. "Have you been reading Janice's romance novels again?"

"Yep," Sulu replied. "Can't get my secret joy of fairytale romances satisfied by your sorry ass, now can I?"

"Point," Jim allowed.

"Maybe he just needs a bit of time. I mean, he probably didn't even know you were sobering up again. This is probably a way big shock for him – even if he did still love you."

"Yeah," Jim mumbled. "Yeah, I guess so."

"So hang about for your week, do the touristy shit if they even have any in Minnesota – and by the way, if you guys ever do get friendly again, ask on my behalf: why the _fuck _did he go to Minne-fucking-sota? It's a _hole_! – and if I find out you went within twenty feet of an art galley, I'll rip your balls off."

"No, I'll just come around and tell Janice all about the modern art," Jim finally managed a low chuckle and though it was far from his usual laugh, it made him feel marginally better about the whole sorry situation.

"And that's when I'll rip your balls off," Sulu replied, quite seriously. "Look, grab a nap and then go out and find some nightclub. Even Minneapolis has to have some nightlife or there would have been a couple of high school shootings by now."

"Not everybody is as anxious to party as you."

"In a whole city? Yeah they are," Sulu scoffed. "It's just backwater bums like you who don't go apeshit without a club and a good DJ. _Trust _me, Minneapolis will have its scene. It's not motherfucking _Montana_."

"One being a city and the other being a state?"

"Smartass."

"Smarter than _you_, college-boy."

"College _dropout_, thank you very much," Sulu sneered.

Jim finally managed a proper laugh, his sore throat retreating under the break in the gloomy mood, and he almost heard Sulu grinning on the other end of the line.

"Thanks, man."

"No problem, queermo."

"_Queermo_? Seriously? What the actual fuck?"

"Yeah, yeah. I didn't drop out of _English_. Now go have a fucking nap, and then go hit the fucking scene, or so help me I'll be waiting on your front porch with a wooden spoon like your momma used to."

"My mother _never _waited on the front porch with a wooden spoon."

"Oh, go to Hell."

"Way ahead of you, buddy. Bye."

He hung up feeling in a much better mood. So the meeting with Spock hadn't resulted in resuming the most glorious relationship he'd ever had – Spock hadn't said to get the fuck back out of his life and _stay _out, had he? And he'd listened to (and even kind of accepted) Jim's apologies. He didn't _hate _him.

It wasn't _so _bad.

* * *

><p>Jim was woken from an uneasy, restless doze – in which Sulus in drag had danced through his glass-strewn kitchen – by the shrill tune of his ringtone, the cell buzzing on the bedside table manically and the display lighting the dark hotel room. He was all ready to swear and knock the phone to the floor and go back to sleep – if not the admittedly weird dreams – when his fuzzy vision caught the <em>number <em>on the display.

To say that he was _surprised _to see that precious number that Gaila had given him lighting up the screen was an understatement.

"Shit!" he gasped, scrabbling for the phone before it could stop. "Sp'ck? Hello?"

There was a short pause, before: "...If I have woken you..."

"No! No, no, it's fine, um, go ahead, it's fine, what is it?" Jim babbled before he could hang up. He said up properly in the bed, scrubbing his hand through his messy hair as though Spock could see him, or it would improve the quality of the bound-to-be-awkward conversation that was about to happen.

There was a long pause, in which all Jim could hear – all he _wanted _to hear – was Spock's slow, even breathing, before: "I read your letter."

"Oh. _Oh_. Um. Shit. I mean, okay, I'm glad you did, but...shit. Okay. Shutting up. And?" Jim prompted, biting his lip to keep from just filling the line with word vomit.

"You...still love me."

"_Yes_."

"And...you wish to...resume our relationship?"

"Spock..."

"All wisdom and reason aside, you wish to resume our relationship?"

"I..._no_. All...everything else aside, I want to start over," Jim whispered, feeling the angry burn of tears beginning to seep into the back of his eyes, hot and itchy. Again. "I...I want to start over, without all the anger and the stupidity and the _hurt_. Do it all again, but better. _Better_."

There was another long, long silence – somehow less awkward and more tense simultaneously, before Spock breathed, "It is _unwise_."

"I know," Jim choked, biting his lip hard against the tears. He _wouldn't _cry. He _wouldn't _– or at least not until Spock hung up. "I know it is, Spock, I _know_. I swear, I'm not going to push for it, I just had to say how sorry I am, and..."

"It would be...Jim, I cannot know whether I can trust you – or whether I could come to trust you."

"I _know_," Jim croaked.

"I cannot know whether you have...changed, or recovered, and I cannot simply take your word for it..."

"Let me prove it?" Jim whispered. "I'll do anything to prove it, Spock, _anything_..."

There was another long pause, in which Jim could feel his own heartbeat hammering a tattoo into the side of his neck.

"My reason has never been able to maintain a strong defence against you," Spock said quietly, almost as though he were speaking to himself.

"W-what?"

"If we were to...attempt to salvage a friendship, then...perhaps I could come to...a conclusion regarding whether or not I can...trust you with more."

Jim was vaguely aware that his heart seemed to have stopped beating. His lungs had most certainly stopped breathing, and he fell backwards until his head landed back onto the pillow with a hard, jarring thud that restarted his lungs, if not his heart.

"Are you...are you saying...?"

"...Yes."

"So...we can...try and be friends?" he asked, and winced at how stupid and cliche and teenage-fucking-kid it sounded.

"If...you wish."

"Fuck yeah I wish," Jim blurted out, and chuckled wetly. "Sorry. Sorry, I just...sorry. Um. Anyway, I'm, um, I'm here until next Sunday. You wanna do something? Like, anything really. Whatever. You're more likely to know what's going on than me, anything's fine really, um..."

Shit, he sounded like a fourteen-year-old asking out his first date and shocked stupid that the poor victim agreed to it. (But fuck it, he was about twelve times as nervous.)

"I will...call you when I am free," Spock said. "I have work."

"Yeah, yeah, sure, okay, that's great, that's fine – shit I need to stop babbling..."

"You are nervous."

"Yeah. Yeah, just a little," he scrubbed furiously at his cheeks with his free wrist; the tears had escaped despite his intentions. "Um, so...give me a call? Whatever, whenever – it's fine."

"I will. I will probably see you next weekend; I still work long hours."

"Okay. Okay, no problem. Kind of guessed. Um, see you."

"Goodbye."

Jim didn't know how long he sat clutching the phone to his chest like that imaginary fourteen-year-old he had likened himself to, but there were painful pink grooves in his skin when he put it down, and drying tears clinging to the edges of his smile.


	21. 20th June 2008

**Notes: **

* * *

><p><em>20th June 2008<em>

"_Fuck it_!" Jim shouted, grabbing a random dish off the drying rack and hurling it at the kitchen door. It exploded into white shards over the tiles, and he followed it up with two more and a glass before he heard the familiar rumble of a car pulling up into the drive.

Today of all days, he had to be home _early_?

Jim shrugged off the irritated thought as unfair and stomped out of the kitchen to arrive in the doorway to the living room just as Spock opened the front door.

"I need a hug," he said briskly, before kicking the door shut behind Spock and sweeping him into a tight grip that probably made his bones creak just a little.

"Jim? What is the matter?" Spock managed. He stared at Jim's face for a second before he said: "Have you been drinking?"

"Oh, how did I fucking guess you'd ask that one?" Jim snapped, then winced and let go of Spock to run both hands over his face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I've just had a really, really bad day."

"What happened?" Spock asked, toeing off his shoes and hanging up his suit jacket in the closet. For once, he abandoned the briefcase to the hall floor.

"I had a five-minute meeting with the boss," Jim said flippantly, and scowled. "I got _fired_, Spock. I'm unemployed. I've lost my fucking job!"

"Oh Jim," Spock said, drawing him back into a hug. Jim clung on fiercely, pressing his nose into the warm skin of his neck. He smelled of tea and the outdoors from having the windows open on the drive home, and vaguely of fresh salad from somewhere or other.

"The fuck am I going to do?" Jim mumbled.

"It will be alright," Spock murmured, squeezing lightly at the back of Jim's neck before the hand came down to rub soothingly at his taut shoulders. "We do not have the concerns of rent, and my wages will cover the bills without too much stress."

"Oh right, and they'll cover upkeep on the car, and our trips for your birthday, and our luxuries, will they?" Jim snapped, before wilting and adjusting his grip again. "Shit, sorry..."

"We will simply have to stop taking trips for a while."

"Fuck that – it's your _birthday_, and..."

"And as long as it is with you, I do not care where it is spent," Spock interrupted smoothly. "We will be alright, Jim. This is not the end of the world – and you have plenty of work experience. I am sure you will be able to find another job soon enough."

"Yeah, well, I need another job _now_! I can't just leave everything up to you – your pay might be bigger than mine, but it isn't _that _big!"

"It will suffice – and it will do so without too much difficulty until you can find other work. If we paid rent, there might be a problem, but as it is, we will be fine, Jim," Spock urged. "We will be alright. This is merely a minor setback; we will be alright."

"Yeah," Jim mumbled, heaving a long sigh and lifting his head to press his nose to the tender spot just underneath Spock's ear before exhaling. He managed a small smile as Spock shivered at the sensation. "Still got a house, and I still got you, and I can get a new job, I guess. Sorry."

"There is nothing to apologise for," Spock insisted, and Jim shook his head, easing back to stroke his hands up and down Spock's upper arms, his anger and tension finally beginning to dissipate properly.

"Um, there kinda is. I had a bit of a hissy fit in the kitchen, and...kind of took it out on the plates."

"Jim..."

"I'll clean it up, I promise," Jim added hastily. "And it was only a couple of things...and a glass. Nothing expensive or anything."

"There is _glass _on the kitchen floor?"

"Yeah – which is why," Jim added, tensing when Spock tried to extract himself and investigate, "you're not going in there." He glanced down at Spock's socked feet pointedly.

"And what are we to do about dinner?" Spock asked, folding his arms and raised a sceptical eyebrow.

"Sulu's invited us over for one of his wok disasters at seven," Jim grimaced. "I think he feels guilty because I got the sack and he didn't."

"Why _did _you?" Spock asked hesitantly.

"Somebody had to," Jim muttered, hunching his shoulders almost defensively. "The garage hasn't been doing well, what with the financial crap happening lately, so somebody had to go. The guy with the least years and experience under his belt happened to be me. So. Sulu's?"

"I suppose it will suffice – but Jim, the glass..."

"I'll do it in the morning, I promise," Jim repeated, unfolding enough to rub a hand over Spock's elbow. "I just...I just need you for a bit. Please?"

Spock answered by kissing him, winding his arms around Jim's shoulders and drawing the tension out of him. After a moment of the attention, Jim began to relax, dragging his hands down to hold Spock at the waist – and paused, drawing back a fraction to frown at him.

"Why are you so tense?"

"Jim..."

"Why?" Jim pushed, rubbing his fingers over the rigid set of Spock's spine where it ran into his hips. "You're not getting one of your migraines, are you?"

"I...have a mild headache, but..."

"Bedroom," Jim said firmly. "I'll give you a massage and make you _melt_. And then maybe a shower," he added as Spock gave into the pressure and began to head up the stairs. "It'll get the last of the knots out. And you're sexiest when you're wet."

Sound reasoning.


	22. Proceed With Caution

**Notes: This update is brought to you by our kind sponsor: David. Hey guys. Matt's in hospital with the mother of all concussions, so I'm updating on his behalf. This will be the last update until he gets out, because he only left one chapter ahead in the document manager, and as I am in Melbourne, I obviously do not have access to his memory stick. He should be back Wednesday or Thursday though, so s'all good.**

* * *

><p><em>Proceed with Caution<em>

It was unbelievably _awkward_.

The fact was that Jim and Spock hadn't seen each other in a year, and had parted on very bad terms. Not only were there practically entire herds of elephants in the room, but they had fallen out of the comfortable, easy rhythm that that they had had before. And no matter how many good intentions hovered around the idea, herds of elephants and no rhythm made relearning each other an incredibly difficult and awkward task.

They set up a strict system – Jim would come up to Minnesota for the weekends and stay in a hotel. They would get together on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, and do whatever happened to catch their attention, and attempt to regain some kind of even keel on the whole messy situation.

It was a lot easier said than done.

Jim, for once, was still absolutely wracked with a nervous, almost terrified guilt. He hardly dared to breach certain topics of conversation, and that included almost everything about their former relationship. On their first weekend together, he made a vague reference to disliking his assistant manager and said distractedly that he wouldn't mind smashing his face in, before hastily taking it back and looking severely guilty for the rest of the afternoon.

Then there was the fact that, really, if Jim wasn't going to talk, who was? Spock had never been exactly _chatty _– when he'd first started going to group functions with Jim, everyone had been unnerved by how he could be entirely silent for hours, yet recite almost word-for-word every conversation that had gone on around him. He _listened_, but that didn't mean he necessarily spoke.

It had been one of Jim's greatest achievements in their four years – getting him to open up. He hadn't gotten very far, and undoubtedly never would, but he had gotten him to the point where he wouldn't suffer in silence with concerns, and didn't clam up when Jim prodded at something.

To have lost that progress was…difficult.

The worst of it was that it wasn't even that Spock was choosing to hold back; Jim could see him struggling to communicate, struggling to convey things to Jim that he wouldn't have done to others. But it was as though he had forgotten _how_ – and Jim didn't dare ask how isolated and lonely he had been for that parted year.

And _then _there was Jim's own confusion – frankly, it was insanity. He was constantly turning between sheer childish _joy _at the fact that Spock was letting them occupy the same twenty feet of open space, and absolute _horror _that Spock was, in however a small way, permitting Jim to re-enter his life after everything he had done. It was _madness_; the rational part of him wanted to run from the situation, to remove _himself _as Spock had _clearly _taken leave of his senses – but the heart and soul of him clung to that tiny sign of _hope_, and protected the flame desperately.

But as one weekend became two, became three, became four, things being to ease. They often spent the weekends quietly talking – they had walked a lot, through parks and fields and nature reserves throughout their relationship, and resumed it around the many lakes of Minneapolis, sometimes even walking in silences that gradually shifted from awkward and nervous to something approaching vaguely comfortable.

Certain topics remained off-limits, but slowly Jim began to learn what had happened after Spock had left, and was upset by how little it really was. He had gotten a new job in Minneapolis, moved to the box-house shortly afterwards, and had simply _stopped_. He never mentioned his colleagues or any friends in the city; he did not mention hobbies or clubs or what he did with his weekends before Jim turned up begging forgiveness – and it struck Jim that perhaps there really was nothing else.

And it was…almost tragic.

Spock never commented on that loneliness, but then Jim hadn't expected him to, and the subject was allowed to gradually slide over multiple visits. Jim was not invited into the box at all, though he did pick Spock up from it once or twice, and he wasn't told where Spock worked (although Gaila _had _given him that information).

He should have guessed, however, and eventually, in mid-March, Spock broached the subject himself.

"How did you find me?"

Whoops. "Er…"

Spock rose an eyebrow. "Mother informed me that you had…contacted her…"

"Yeah, no, it wasn't her. Well. She _did _say – imply, ish – that you were in Minneapolis, but…_c'mon_," Jim blustered. "I could have moved here and spent the rest of my life looking and I'd never have found you."

"So how _did _you find me?"

"This woman Janice knows. She, um. I'm pretty sure she's a hacker."

"I see…"

"She said because you're an immigrant, it would be easy to find you, so…I actually had the information for a while before I did anything. I didn't want to just…blast up here like a fucking moron and blow my shot."

Spock looked faintly amused, and Jim bumped his shoulder, grinning.

"Think I memorised your phone number though, I spent so much time staring at it. I rang once when I knew you'd be working, just to see if you had a personalised voicemail."

"Then for the sake of my answering machine, I am glad that I do not."

Jim snorted and scuffed at the path with his toe, feeling like a kid caught out and surprised not to be punished. "You didn't ever expect to see me again, did you?"

"I…no. I…had entertained hopes but I did not realistically expect for…this to happen," Spock admitted. "I thought that your problem would be permanent, and…"

"It will be," Jim said. "I can't ever drink again. But when I remember what I did, I don't want to. They drum that into you at those meetings. We can't ever do it again or we'll be right back to square one. And I'm not. Doing it again, I mean."

"You have…changed," Spock said suddenly, then paused. "No…you have changed _back_. You are more like you were at the beginning of our relationship."

"Is that a good thing?"

"Yes," he said simply.

And quite suddenly, Jim felt as though absolutely everything was possible.

* * *

><p>Jim's week quickly became a routine. As March closed, he began work on the garden, and so his weekdays fell into a busy pattern that kept his mind off the beer and the empty bed, and onto the weekends and Tuesday nights in Kalona.<p>

He worked from Monday to Friday, and would come home from work each day to clean, call Sulu, and work in the garden. On Tuesdays, he would go to Kalona and even if he didn't talk to the rest of the group, would update Dr. McCoy on his progress and the long, long string of continuous crosses on the wall calendar. Fridays, he would twitch his way through a shift and barely sleep, packing and repacking his overnight bag and checking and rechecking his hotel reservation until the night receptionist on the other end threatened to emasculate him with her stapler (true story).

Saturday morning he would trip up to Minneapolis, learning to love the route even though, really, it was boring and tedious and had no views to speak of, and Minneapolis _itself _wasn't a city that had ever much appealed to Jim. Similarly, the return journey on Sunday evenings was the low point of Jim's week, no matter how tense or awkward the visit had been.

And slowly they became _less _awkward and more fun. As Spock reacted less and less to any hint of their history, Jim began to relax about potentially slipping up, and slowly they began to loosen up around each other. Jim doubted they would ever be able to _joke _about it, but he slowly allowed himself to poke fun at Minneapolis and the odd co-worker that Spock would mention, and compare them to the receptionist, Miss Astansi, that Jim had made a sport out of pissing off.

And Jim found himself…falling in love _twice_.

In mourning the loss of their relationship and tying himself up in knots over what was going to happen, Jim had inevitably formed an image of Spock in his head – those last images, of a man wary of him and hesitant to speak his mind for fear of annoying him. Part of him had forgotten the dry, quick humour that lay under those thick bands of calm and tranquillity. Part of him had forgotten the half-smiles and the expressive eyes and the way his eyebrows talked _for _him.

Rediscovering those little things was like falling in love for the second time, only without actually having fallen _out _of love in the first place.

And with that came the difficulty. Jim's heart wanted nothing more than to grab hold and never let go – kidnap Spock and bring him back to Iowa and lock him in the house, keep him forever, and pick up whatever pieces he could salvage of what they had been. His head, of course, vehemently fought the idea and commanded him to keep his thoughts, his ideas, his _hands_, to himself.

But he had always found it difficult to keep himself in check around Spock, and as the man slowly opened up to him again, his struggle was not eased in the slightest. He ruefully thought, more than once, that alcohol had nothing on Spock.

Sometimes, he would think that he was utterly fucked. Spock had said friends, and showed no inclination to take it further. Spock seemed to be happy with their arrangement as it was and, in any case, he would be a fool to take Jim back into his heart after everything that had happened. He would be foolish to do it, and Spock was nobody's fool. So they would go on indefinitely, it seemed, hovering at friends when they had been more and Jim eternally trying to keep his hands to himself and eventually, _one day_, Spock would find somebody else and move on, and forget all about Jim.

And then sometimes, just sometimes, Jim would catch him watching, with an unreadable expression as though he were attempting a calculation without all of the input data, and Jim would think that just perhaps he was mistaken.


	23. Homecoming

**Notes: I'm baaaaaack! And I love how you all assumed it was something _I_ did.**

* * *

><p><em>Homecoming<em>

"Hello?"

"Hey, Spock, it's Jim."

"Jim? What…?"

"Um, are you free this weekend? Like, no appointments or anything important to do?"

"Why?"

"Because Sulu and Janice got engaged, and they're throwing a party Saturday."

Sulu and Janice had gotten together around the same time as Jim and Spock, and had lived in sin (despite the ranting of Sulu's mother, Janice's grandmother, Sulu's last three landladies, and all of Janice's colleagues who were obsessed with marriage and babies) quite happily ever since. When Sulu had called him that morning, deciding that he was going to propose, Jim had been sceptical that he actually _would _– until Janice called an hour later saying, "He proposed!"

"That is…remarkable news…"

"I know, it surprised me too," Jim grinned. "I'm not sure who's making an honest person out of who."

"Whom."

"So, anyway, they're throwing a big party Saturday night and…you should come. Everyone would like to see you, and they're your friends too, and…and they missed you too. Not as much as I did, but they still missed you. You should come and see them and convey your congratulations or whatever in person."

"I…Jim, perhaps…"

"There's still spare rooms here, you know," Jim said quietly. "I won't push or bother you or anything. Just…come? Come down Saturday evening, come to the party, and we can hang out Sunday and I can show you what I'm going to do with the yard."

"…Very well. What time should I arrive for?"

"I dunno. About six? I won't head over until at least seven so six gives you time to shower and change or whatever."

"Very well."

"Awesome. I'll see you then – have a good week. Bye!" Jim nearly slammed the phone down, his heart making a valiant attempt to escape via his breastbone. It had taken him nearly two hours to muster up the courage to make the call in the first place, terrified that Spock would say no or it would be too much of a push. Jim going up to Minneapolis and staying in a hotel was one thing; Spock coming down here and staying in the house was something else entirely.

A vague urge for a drink crept into the back of Jim's mind, and he flung himself up from the couch explosively, grabbing his jacket and opting to jog round to Sulu's rather than take the bike or the car. They could discuss how Sulu was totally fucking _screwed _because marrying Janice would be the most puffed-up, ridiculous affair of pompous preening Iowa had seen since the 1800s, until Jim forgot about beer again.

* * *

><p>McCoy <em>almost <em>smiled when Jim stood up at the beginning of the meeting, still clutching that dog-eared photograph, but managed to school it into his usual calm, accepting, I'm-a-doctor-so-nothing-you-say-would-surprise-me face.

"My boyfriend's coming down at the weekend," Jim said.

Okay, so maybe some things _were _surprising.

"Okay, my ex-boyfriend. We're not back together or anything, but…" Jim shrugged. "My friend just got engaged so I talked my ex into coming to the party too. We're trying to be friends, but it's really hard not pushing for more because I think you all know I'm still crazy about him…"

A faint chuckle rippled through the group.

"I'm hoping that the party will convince him that I mean it when I say I'm not drinking anymore. I mean…this friend of mine, we go back like six years now, and we used to work together, and whenever I'd go round his I'd come back smashed, so…so if my ex sees me sober at one of those parties, I'm hoping it'll make him believe me."

McCoy was suddenly struck with the hope that this Spock _did _believe him. He'd watched Jim steadily and stubbornly get his shit together since July, clawing his way towards sobriety with a dogged determination that had always centred wholly around this ex-boyfriend. It was very apparent that this boyfriend still held Jim's heart in the palm of his hand, and McCoy was struck with a powerful hope that Spock could see what McCoy could: a pained, struggling young man desperately trying – and cutting huge paths towards success – to make amends and stay on the straight and narrow for good.

"All I want is for him to believe me," Jim mumbled, staring down at that now-familiar picture, and _McCoy _believed him.

* * *

><p>Jim was halfway out the door, already depressed and worn down, when there was a rumble of a car engine and Spock's unfamiliar new Minnesotan-plated car peeled into the road.<p>

It was disturbing how quickly Spock could lift his mood just by turning up.

"My apologies," were the first words out of Spock's mouth as he got out of the car. "There was an accident at the state line and the traffic was somewhat abysmal."

"Hey, no worries, you got here," Jim managed a grin. "C'mon, nobody'll care if we're a bit late. You okay to go like that?"

'Like that' consisted of black slacks and a black shirt – Spock didn't do slovenly casual like Jim did – that were altogether a little ridiculously hot on him. Jim was having serious difficulty keeping his eyes to the friendly zone.

"'Like this' is fine," Spock said, and Jim frowned at him as they headed down the sidewalk. It wasn't still so cold that walking two blocks over would be a strain, and most of the ice had gone by now.

"Your…accent sounds a little thicker."

"My father called this morning."

"Your _Dad_? Holy shit! Wait, are you okay? You haven't heard from him in…" Jim floundered, and stopped dead, setting a hand on Spock's elbow. "Hey. You okay?"

"I am quite well. It was a…tense conversation, but one that I suspect my mother coerced him into making. It did not last long, but he insisted that we spoke in Japanese. It is…curious how my grasp of English slips after even an hour without it."

"I guess," Jim said doubtfully. He'd been good at languages in school, but certainly didn't speak anything else fluently. Spock's English was so good – if unwaveringly formal and _perfect _– that he sometimes forgot that it wasn't his first language at all. "You sure you're okay, though?"

"Yes."

"What did he want to talk about?" Jim asked, resuming their walk hesitantly. From experience, he knew that Spock was rarely 'well' after speaking to his father – their relationship took 'terse' to a whole new level that even Jim and his mom had never achieved – but he was also unsure of how much pushing would be welcome.

"Nothing of importance."

Okay, no pushing. He knew _that _tone of voice.

"Oh, I should probably warn you."

"Warn me of what?"

"I kind of didn't say you were coming," Jim blurted out as they reached the community hall. "So Janice might…"

"_Oh my God, Spock_!"

Jim winced at the decibel level, Spock winced at the pitch, and suddenly Janice Rand had hauled off and punched Jim's ex-boyfriend squarely in the chest.

"You son of a bitch, you waltzed off and left me to deal with these pathetic sorry _men_!" she snapped, then flung her arms around him. "Why didn't you say you were _coming_?"

Spock was quite unable to reply, as she seemed to be cutting off his air, so Jim did it for him: "I invited him, and um, kind of forgot to mention it."

"You _forgot_?" Janice snapped, let go of Spock, and punched Jim in the arm.

For the record? Freaking _ow_. Like, _holy shit what did teachers learn in teacher school_?

"You're an asshole," Janice informed him flatly and hooked an arm into Spock's. "You. Come with me. You _are _going to tell me _everything _that I've missed since you dropped his sorry ass, and you're going to do it _now_. Don't even _think _about escaping."

Spock was wise enough not to object, or struggle, and allowed himself to be whisked off to a corner of the room with Janice.

"Your fiancée is a menace," Jim informed a snickering Sulu sourly.

"Yeah, but it's your fault for not telling her. Or me. Seriously, Jim, he's _here_. How in the hell did you pull that one off?"

"Babbled until he said yes to shut me up," Jim grimaced, rubbing his arm.

"I can't deny it's nice to see him again," Sulu shrugged, "but…isn't this a little heavy? And _fast_?"

Jim shrugged. "I can't help it, Sulu. And he didn't say no, so…yeah. Maybe it is a bit fast, but you know what? He's here. I can't argue with the results."

"I guess."

"Shouldn't we, you know, rescue him?"

"Oh God, no. Not for at least another ten minutes."

"Ah. Okay."

Jim did eventually bring himself to rescue Spock from Janice's scolding, and fended her off for the rest of the evening. Spock seemed to be vaguely bemused by his welcome, and visibly surprised by Sulu's warm greeting, and Jim wondered if he'd assumed that Jim had badmouthed him in his absence and that there was not a soul left in Riverside that would like him at all. It was a sad thought – a _bitter _thought – but Jim couldn't bring himself to ask.

He did notice, however, that Spock wasn't drinking.

Sulu had not made it an alcohol-free function, and Jim hadn't expected him to. The wine was flowing freely with the other guests, and Spock had usually taken a glass of wine to act as a prop at parties. He could make one glass last for hours.

But tonight, he had a glass of water, and fended off all attempts to buy him a drink made by well-meaning locals who hadn't seen him in a year or more.

"Why?" Jim asked eventually when they got a quiet moment, tapping the glass of water with his own.

"Why…what?"

"Why haven't you got some wine? It's good wine; you know Janice wouldn't settle for shitty wine."

Spock simply stared at him.

"_Why_?" Jim persisted.

"In truth, Jim, I have not consumed alcohol since the last Christmas party I attended in Iowa City."

Jim blinked as he processed the implication. "So…you've not touched a drop since _before _you…left?"

"Correct."

"…Why?" Jim breathed, and it was more of a breath than a question or even a conversational query.

"I have developed a distaste for alcohol."

"Because of me."

"…Because of your…our…problems, yes," Spock admitted after a moment, and Jim felt something crinkle and cough wetly in his chest, like his heart had just caught tuberculosis.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"I know," Spock said, quite matter-of-factly, sipping from the water as though it _were _wine. "Jim. I am not _fragile_. Please desist in treating me as such."

"Sorry, but…" Jim waved a hand, and laughed quietly. "_I'm _fragile – about you, anyway."

"I…see."

"Spock, I've spent the last year and a bit in…frankly, a shitty state. And now…I'm just desperate not to blow this second chance, you know? Even if we never get back together, I…I just need that. To know that you're okay and that you don't hate me and that I didn't fuck up absolutely _everything_ for either of us."

"You did not."

"And I…"

"Jim. You did not."

And faced with that impenetrable dark stare of the man he had nearly driven out of his life for good, Jim had very little choice but to…believe him.


	24. 6th November 2008

**Notes: **

* * *

><p><em>6th November 2008<em>

It took four attempts before his key would fit in the lock, and when it did, the door jerked itself open with such enthusiasm that Jim nearly ended up face-down on the hallway floor and barely rescued himself in time, grabbing onto the phone table for some support. He shucked his jacket on the floor and barely remembered to lock up the front door properly before the faded smell of cooking caught his nose and drew him further into the house.

He followed the smell of food to the kitchen and winced as he noticed the time on the clock – ten to two – and groaned when he found a covered dish of Thai curry in the microwave. His stomach rudely informed him that it had had quite enough to handle with the more-than-a-few pints in the last few hours, thank you very much, and he closed the microwave again without bothering to remove or reheat the meal.

The house was silent. The lights had been left on in the hall and the kitchen for him, but the upstairs was dark and quiet. He kicked off his boots against the living room wall and winced when one of them caught a stack of CDs that came tumbling down.

Sure enough, there was a whisper – a _sense _rather than any real sound – of movement, and a second later, the floorboards in the bedroom began to creak in a familiar stride.

"Jim?"

The upstairs light snapped on, and Jim padded out to the hall to squint unsteadily up the stairs as Spock appeared at the top of them, his usually perfect hair ruffled from sleep. Jim hadn't seen him since this morning, and it was weird to notice, even very drunk, how attractive he was in any state of dress – or undress, as the case may be.

"Hey," he said, grinning, then schooled it when his survival instinct took note of the time and the look on Spock's face. "M'sorry. I went out to Murphy's, and…"

"And you are drunk. Again," Spock replied flatly.

"Just a little," Jim admitted, stumbling over the last word. "Not _real _drunk. M'okay. Didn't do anything stupid. And Sulu drove me home, so…"

"I have work in the morning," Spock interrupted coldly, before turning on his barefoot heel and disappearing. Jim winced. He was most definitely in trouble.

He decided to attempt some form of sobriety before confronting – or being confronted – by his probably quite pissy boyfriend, so he stopped off in the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth before creeping into their room and switching on the lamp on his side of the bed. The lamps were weak, and barely illuminated the shape turned away from him in the sheets.

"Sp'ck?" he whispered, clambering gracelessly onto the bed. "You awake?"

"You make so much noise, I cannot help but be," Spock muttered darkly, but he kept his back firmly to Jim.

"Y'mad at me?"

"Yes," came the flat – and surprising – reply. Spock _never _admitted that he was angry, and it squashed any buoyancy left in Jim's mood quite thoroughly.

"M'sorry," Jim said, creeping under the covers and wrapping himself around Spock's back. It was like hugging a warm concrete pillar, and his survival instinct quailed at the feeling. He was in _big _trouble. "All my applications got rejected, so I went for a drink and the game was on, you know how it is…"

"Yes, Jim, I do know – because this is becoming your daily routine," Spock said – but rather than ranting and scolding, he just sounded tired, and something in Jim's chest that the alcohol hadn't dulled yet twisted painfully.

"I'm sorry," he said again, burying his nose in the back of Spock's neck. "I am. I'm sorry."

"No, Jim, you are not – because tomorrow, you will do it again, as you did _yesterday_. I saw more of you when we lived apart than I do now – and whenever I do see you, you are either asleep or drunk."

He still didn't turn over, and Jim was getting rather desperate that he did, tugging lightly in an attempt to coax him to move. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I won't go out tomorrow, I promise. I really am sorry. I don't mean to."

"Don't mean to _what_, Jim?" Spock still sounded very tired, and he still refused to turn over or relax at all.

"Upset you."

"You still have no idea," Spock murmured. "Jim, leave me alone. I have to go to work in the morning. I need to sleep."

"I'm just trying to apologise!" Jim snapped, his temper flaring up. He was just trying to say he was sorry. He _knew _it hadn't been nice of him, but he was apologising! Spock didn't have to be such a dick about it.

"You can apologise in the _morning_, Jim! When you are sober and I do not have to sleep," Spock snapped back. If he had seemed tense before, his torso was absolutely rigid now.

"Well, I'm sorry for being such a prick as to wake you the fuck up! I didn't do it on purpose!" Jim snarled. "It's not like I'm having a blast, is it? At least you _have _a job to go to!"

Spock was up and out of the bed before Jim could even finish his sentence, reaching for his bathrobe, back still decidedly turned as though he couldn't look Jim in the face. As if Jim was fucking _repulsive _to him or something.

"Where the fuck are you going now?" Jim growled, exasperated.

"I am going to sleep in the spare room – where I _can _sleep," Spock shot over his shoulder as he jerked the bedroom door open. "I have no interest in a petty argument at quarter past two in the morning!"

And with that, he slammed out of the bedroom, and Jim was left to stare at the spinning ceiling and swear. Loudly, and creatively.


	25. Again

**Notes: What (some) of you have been waiting for ;)**

* * *

><p><em>Again<em>

"Oh shit," Jim said – and half a second later, the rain hit.

It wasn't just rain, it was _rain_. Indian monsoons had nothing on that rain, and it drummed down like it was solid, not liquid. In half a minute, the entire formerly-busy lakeside (it was, after all, noon on a Saturday) was cleared of people and the parking lot was humming with engine activity.

The sprint back to the car was only five or six seconds, but by the time they reached it, they could not possibly have been wetter, not even if they'd gone swimming. The leather on the seats didn't make a sound against their slick clothing, and Jim groaned.

"My shoes are filled," he said when Spock shot him an odd look.

"I see."

"Jesus Christ," Jim muttered, peering out at the sky. "How about we just call it a day? That shit isn't going anywhere."

"Agreed."

"So, shall I drop you off at home?" Jim asked tentatively as he put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking space. "I mean, you probably want to get a shower and change and everything, so…"

"We could watch television at my house," Spock offered – and quite out of the blue. He had been careful, thus far, to keep Jim away from his box.

"You have geeky science fiction box sets?" Jim asked, deliberately casually.

"Yes."

"Okay. Sure. If I can borrow a towel, anyway," Jim grimaced at the wet, cloying feeling in his socks. "This is pretty disgusting. Socks are gross."

Spock, perhaps wisely, didn't ask what on earth he was talking about, and merely gave calmly-delivered directions until they pulled up in his neighbourhood again.

The box hadn't changed since Jim's sneaky visit in January, but it didn't occur to him until he was walked across the threshold that he was going to see the inside as well.

"I am in need of a shower," Spock admitted. "Please feel free to make yourself a drink or use the kitchen."

"Sure; I'll grab the bathroom after you," Jim shrugged, and waited until the bathroom door closed behind Spock before stripping off his shoes and socks on the mat and exploring.

There wasn't a great deal to explore: the box wasn't a Tardis. It really was as small on the inside as it looked on the outside – if not smaller. The main 'box' was made up of a tiny kitchenette that could barely fit a grown man, and a living area that was entirely dominated by a two-seater, threadbare couch and a small television set that had _definitely _been bought second hand. There weren't really any personal effects – the odd book, and a potted cactus on top of the television. But then, of course, he had left everything at Jim's, and never come back to collect it. He'd never even asked about it – maybe that whole Buddhist thing meant that he didn't really care, but it still felt _wrong _to stand in the middle of his house and not have a clue that it _was _his house.

Off from the main box were the closed door that indicated the bathroom, and another, ajar door that led to a small bedroom. It was graced with a large window with a view down the street, and was bright and airy, but otherwise was just as cramped and soulless as the rest of the box-house. It contained a chest of drawers right out of a Swedish furniture catalogue, a folded ironing board leaning sadly against the bare wall, and a narrow, steel-framed single bed that had been made to military precision, and probably within an inch of its life.

There was nothing of _Spock _in this room.

The pipes suddenly shut off, and Jim zipped back into the main room to flick the kettle on and dig around in the (gratifyingly cluttered) cupboards for mugs and teabags. Strange: before Spock, he'd never really drunk tea, but even after they'd split up, he'd continued to make it and occasionally even drink it.

_That _was here. The house _smelled _like it was Spock's: tea permeated _everything_.

"If you wish to use the shower…"

He turned – and hastily turned _back_ from the seriously-difficult-to-resist sight of Spock standing in the bathroom doorway, towel wrapped around his hips and dripping water. His libido, quite suddenly resurrected after over a year of being utterly comatose, began to cry pathetically and ineffectively slap his reasoning skills with all the strength and might of a four-year-old girl.

"Um, yeah, thanks," he stammered.

"There are towels in the cupboard under the sink."

He waited until the bedroom door clicked shut before darting in the bathroom and nearly slamming the door. It was a tiny room with a shower stall that was completely fogged up, and familiar shampoo and shower gel bottles on the shelf inside that _still _lingered in Jim's house despite the fact he didn't typically use them.

"No," he told his cock firmly. "No jacking it in Spock's bathroom."

* * *

><p>When he emerged, redressed in a spare shirt and loose sweatpants that Spock had left on the side for him, the smell of fresh tea had pierced the main room and Jim's clothes were draped over a clothes rack in the bedroom doorway. Spock was sitting on the couch, legs curled up under himself in a contented lotus position, mug of tea in hand and attention fixed on the news reel that was discussing some bus crash in Argentina.<p>

"Thanks," Jim said, dropping down onto the couch. "I feel much better. What's going on?"

"Thirteen dead, including an American ex-patriot," Spock said quietly.

"Oh," Jim glanced around. "So…did you move in here right after…?"

"Not immediately," Spock said. "I rented an apartment for three months beforehand, but decided to change locations after I was burgled six times in three months."

"Jesus!"

"I had nothing of value, merely windows to break."

"_Still_," Jim winced. Nobody burgled anybody else in Riverside, simply because half the population was armed and the _entire _population knew everyone else. It was just a dumbass career choice. "Do you get burgled here?"

"Occasionally, but not so often," Spock shrugged, gaze still fixed on the television.

"Good," Jim frowned. "You should probably proof this up a bit more; that..."

"Jim."

He stopped, brought up short by the flat interruption, and the television babbled in the gap for a moment before:

"In your letter, you mentioned feelings of inferiority because you no longer saw yourself as able to provide for me."

Jim's mouth went dry in a moment, the moisture leeching out of it until it resembled a desert.

"Was that true?"

"...Yeah," Jim croaked, ducking his head and scrubbing at his hair nervously. "I...yeah. Yeah, it was."

"...Why?"

Jim's face twisted. "Shit, Spock, I don't know. It's just...that's what I'm supposed to do, you know? If I could do things for you – your birthdays trips, vacations, just...spoil you, whatever, then...then..."

He swallowed and shook his head.

"I never...you know, I never thought about it until I wouldn't be able to do it anymore, after I got fired, but...Spock, you gotta understand that you are..._way _out of my league, you know? I'm a _mechanic _in the middle of _nowhere_, and you're a trilingual gonna-be lawyer, and...and I guess I thought if I could just...keep spoiling you and making you feel special, then..."

"Jim," Spock said quietly, "I did not need a vacation to know that you loved me."

Jim shrugged. "I dunno, Spock, I'm not...I'm not explaining it so good. Like...it wasn't even just that. I guess it's just a stupid guy thing – I'm supposed to look after you. I just felt like I was supposed to be able to give you anything you wanted, and like I _should _be able to spoil you, and..."

"You once...expressed it as a desire to feel useful."

"...Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's what it was," Jim could feel himself flushing. "You were just so brilliant and independent and _capable_. You didn't need me."

"I always needed you."

"What?"

Spock took a measured breath. "I am...unused to the ways and mannerisms of Americans. I am often uncomfortable with my colleagues. I am separated from my family, and have little in the way of contacts. With you, I did not recall any of my history or concerns. I was simply myself, and you loved me for that self."

The air had been sucked out of the room; Jim couldn't _breathe _for the lack of it.

"I did not need you to provide for me financially. I did not need regular vacations or celebrations. I needed you, and when everything changed, I did not _understand_."

Jim unfolded his tense limbs and shifted sideways on the narrow couch to peer at Spock's face.

"Early on," he said slowly. "I think I knew that. But...later? I don't know. Maybe I lost sight of that."

"Perhaps I let you."

"Maybe," Jim hedged, unwilling to begin to assign blame. "But I think I just needed to feel useful sometimes, you know? You remember how everything would be just...a little bit more okay if I was bringing you heat packs for your migraines, or...or when I had to drive you to work that couple weeks you broke your hand?"

"Yes."

"I just...I just need to be doing things for you sometimes," Jim said. "Well, needed to."

"You were about to recommend locking mechanisms for my home; I think it is safe to say that you still have that need."

The mood eased ever so slightly, and Jim cracked a smile and a quiet laugh.

"Yeah, okay, maybe I do," he admitted. "Maybe you could...indulge me sometimes? I dunno. Just...let me? Now and then?"

Spock did that _thing_, when he was calculating, somewhere behind the eyes, but Jim found that he didn't mind the stare – and eventually, it resulted in a quiet, "Perhaps."

"So. Where's those sci-fis you promised me?"

* * *

><p>The DVD ran to credits, and Jim glanced at his watch.<p>

"Whoa, shit. I'm meant to be checking out at six," he jumped up off the sofa and seized his clothes off the drying rack. "Um, do you mind if I return these next weekend?"

"No," Spock said, rising gracefully and turning off the television. "You are welcome to them."

"Thanks," Jim grinned, stuffing his feet clumsily into his sneakers.

"Have a safe journey," Spock offered, following him to the front door to see him out.

"Thanks," Jim said – and quite suddenly, without thinking, turned and kissed him.

It was as though they had never quit. It was as though they stood in the hall of Jim's house on a grey Iowan morning, and Jim was trying to kiss-talk Spock into staying home from work, even though they both knew the attempt would be futile. It was as though they were still _them_, and for a brief moment, Jim's soul returned to his body and settled warmly back in the middle of his heart.

Then he realised exactly what he was doing.

"Shit!" he stepped back hastily, breaking the kiss. "Oh my God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't – I didn't mean to! I just didn't think, and…and I'm so sorry, I swear, I'm not trying to…"

"Jim."

"I – what?"

"Be _quiet_."

And then a large, smooth hand slid around the back of Jim's neck, and Spock's lips were back on his, surprisingly soft and just a little chapped, the way they'd always been, like home territory that no matter how far you wandered, you always recalled perfectly – familiar and warm and _brilliant_…

There was a thump as Jim dropped the armful of clothes he held, and his hands hesitantly found their way to grasp at Spock's elbows and tug him just a hair closer.

"Spock…" he breathed into the seams of a wonderfully familiar mouth, and he felt the muscles twitch as Spock suppressed a smile.

"You have to check out of your hotel," Spock murmured. When Jim dared to open his eyes – hell, when had he closed them? – Spock's were closed. "You have work in the morning."

"Fuck work," Jim breathed, and chuckled almost like a shy teenager. "This is a bit more important."

"You have to go," Spock insisted quietly, still not tensing up or raising his voice. He was relaxed and languid, all the tension and unhappiness wrung out of him. _This _was the man that Jim had missed so badly.

"When I come back," Jim mumbled, "would you go out with me? Like, proper? On a date out?"

They were the exact words he'd said before – the babbling list of questions he'd put to an office intern in Iowa City in the middle of winter, nearly three weeks before Christmas all those years ago – and when Spock huffed a low, quiet laugh, he knew that they both remembered.

"Will you?" Jim prompted – as he had all those years ago, and Spock finally opened his eyes to stare at him with those dark, unfathomable depths.

"Yes."


	26. Straight Boyfriend

**Notes: Shorter than usual, but then, the previous was longer than usual. So it balances. So I don't care. Enjoy!**

* * *

><p><em>Straight Boyfriend<em>

"_Yeeeeeeeello_!"

"Sulu!"

"Jim?"

"Sulu, for the love of God, you have to get over here the minute you're off work. Seriously. Jesus fucking fuck, seriously!"

"Whoa, Jim, calm down, what's going…?"

"Fuck, Sulu, fuck, Spock agreed!"

"Um, agreed to…?"

"He agreed to fucking bungee-jumping in the Amazon – what the fuck do you think, Sulu? I asked him out – dating, kissing, the whole romantic enchilada that you and Janice should do but don't – and he agreed. Fuck, Sulu, he agreed!"

"Whoa! Jim, he…?"

"Yes! Jesus Christ, Sulu, what the hell did he do that for?" Jim was in fully-fledged ranting mode by now, and Sulu was getting a headache just trying to keep up.

"Wait, that's a _bad _thing?"

"Of course it's a fucking bad thing! I'm not good for him! Jesus Christ, Sulu, I'm just going to fuck this up and break his heart and _what the fucking hell do I do now_? Oh my _God_, Sulu, I'm not ready for this! I'm just going to mess it all up – why the fuck did I have to kiss him? Why did he have to kiss me?"

Sulu had a powerful urge to write a suicide note to Janice and find a bridge to drive off. "Okay, so…you kissed?"

"Have you not been listening to me? Yes! We fucking kissed! That weird thing humans do when they press their mouths together and swap spit!"

"Ew, Jim."

"Fuck off. Sulu! Seriously! What in the hell am I supposed to do? I'll have to break it off somehow, I can't just go…"

"Whoa, Jim, he kissed you too, right? That doesn't sound like he's having second thoughts…"

"He doesn't need to! Apparently he _is _an idiot because he agreed to take me back! He can't take me back, Sulu – we went over this! If he does…"

"If he does," Sulu interrupted loudly, "then, because you are _sober_, Jim, _stone cold sober_, you can get that disgustingly happy weird gay romance back. That one that had half the state puking and condemning homosexuality because _no man in the world _should go that gaga and googly-eyed. _Ever_."

"Are you _shitting _me? All it would take is one beer and I could, I could…"

"Jim, you were absolutely _fucked _when that shit went down. Considering you have no beer in your _house_, and I will personally come over there with a gun and _kneecap _you if you buy any – and believe me, I have spies – I don't think that's going to be an issue."

"_Sulu_, I…!"

"_JIM FUCKING KIRK_."

Jim shut up.

"Thank you," Sulu said. "Now stop queening and fucking _listen _to me. Me. Your straight boyfriend who's been fucking Janice Rand, Queen of the Icicle Bees, and hasn't killed himself yet. I know what I'm doing, yes?"

"…Yes," came a very small, somewhat pathetic voice.

"Okay. Now. Let's start with the basics. You have been sober _how long_?"

"Since fifth December."

"And the date is?"

"April eighteenth."

"Awesome. So that's a _while_, isn't it?"

"Yes. But…"

"Shut your howling trap," Sulu said casually, earning himself a very funny look from the only other occupant of the diner. "And you have been seeing Spock again – no funny semantics, don't even start with me, Mister I-Only-Finished-High-School-For-Melissa-Jason's-Tits – for how long?"

"About three months."

"Nearly four, but okay," Sulu tossed off. "And then you kissed him?"

"Y-yes."

"And then he kissed you?"

"Yes."

"And then you asked him out?"

"Yes."

"And then he said yes?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Awesome. _The facts are somewhat basic here_, Jim. Give it another shot."

"Have you not been listening to me?"

"My burst eardrum says yes," Sulu muttered. "He's not fucking stupid, Jim. Just lay out some ground rules or something, like no drinking and no ignoring any, er, aggression issues. And take it _slow_. He'll still be in Minneapolis and you'll still be down here. It kind of limits how badly wrong it could go."

"I…I guess so…"

"Anyway, you love him, don't you?"

"I always loved him," Jim returned hotly, "but it didn't stop me from…"

"Yeah, I know, only, you were also trashed and you won't ever be trashed again so that kind of removes that issue from the equation," Sulu said impatiently. "Jim, c'mon a second. The guy's obviously willing to forgive you the, um, lapse, isn't he? Otherwise he'd have shot you on the doorstep and got that scary-ass Japanese old man of his to run you out of the universe."

"What the…?"

"Jim. Trust me on this. Japanese parents – _you do not want to know what they can do_. Count your lucky fucking stars his momma's an American," Sulu said. "They believe in human rights. Just about."

"Um, okay."

"Jim, seriously," he dropped his tone. "You can't just go…rejecting this out of hand when you've sorted the issue that caused your break-up. You're still crazy about him. And you know something? He was always crazy about you too. I was hardly best buddies with him, but I wasn't blind. The guy adored you. If he's willing to try again, then I'm willing to bet that he still does."

Jim had gone very, very quiet.

"You were good for each other, Jim. I'm going to be real honest. When you got fired, without Spock, you would have drunk yourself to death in a month. You only stayed as level as you did because of him, and when he left, I honest-to-God thought you were going to kill yourself. You nearly _did_. And it's all down to him that you've recovered at all. Not to quote Janice's crappy romcoms or anything, but…that guy's your one, right? He's the only guy for you."

"Yeah," Jim whispered, in a very, very quiet voice. "Yeah. Yeah, he is."

"Okay," Sulu said. "So don't toss that out if it even _looks _like you can solve things. You two belonged together, and if you can even attempt to get that back, then _do it_. For the love of pretzels, _do it_."

"But," Jim took a breath, "what if...Sulu, what if...what if I've _not _sorted it? What if I fall off the wagon again?"

"Is that likely?" Sulu asked. "Now? Now you know what you stand to lose if you do? Now that you're centred enough to admit you did it in the first place? And now - damn it, Jim, you've struggled so damn hard and it's all been for him. Now that you actually have another _shot_, are you _likely _to go and fuck it up again?"

"It...it would just...take me _not thinking_, for like, a _second_..."

"You won't," Sulu said flatly. "You can't see _yourself_, Jim, and ever since you _met _him, there's not been a time when you weren't thinking about Spock. And now he's willing to give you another chance..."

"But _why_?"

"How in the hell would I know, Jim? Just don't look a gift horse in the mouth, and _take it_. Don't throw it away because of something you _might _do."

There was a long pause.

"You're, like, the best fucking friend ever."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm your straight boyfriend. Now go and get your _gay _boyfriend, or I will cancel my afternoon lesson and come over there, stake you out on the front lawn, and paint your nails pink. _All of them_."

"Okay, okay. I'm…we're going out Saturday night in Minneapolis," Jim said. "Dinner in some restaurant or other."

"Good. And you will sweep in and charm him and be disgustingly in love and all will be well."

"Okay. Okay," Jim said, and took a decisive breath. "Okay. Sulu?"

"Yeah?"

"Why the fuck do you have pink nail polish?"


	27. 5th March 2009

**Notes: Real life is kicking my ass. It's gettin' good at that.**

* * *

><p><em>5th March 2009<em>

"Jim."

The coffee table was littered in empty lager cans and the odd glass bottle, all emptied and all having been full when Spock had left that morning. Another, half-drunk, rested on the arm of the chair, and Jim's eyes were hazy and dark when he turned his gaze to Spock and grinned.

"Hey, y'home!" he beamed, and clumsily put the half-finished drink down. "C'mere, c'mere…"

He hauled himself up off the couch with considerable effort and staggered the six feet to where Spock stood in the doorway, throwing his arms around him with considerable enthusiasm. The smell of the alcohol was overpowering, and Spock's eyes almost watered with the intensity of it. There had been gin today as well as the usual.

"H'w was work?" Jim asked, fumbling with his tie. Spock listlessly watched him toss it aside and fiddle with the top button of his shirt idly. "Spock?" Jim prompted. His eyes were almost fuzzy. "G'd day?"

"It was…adequate," Spock returned, eyeing the devastation in the living room. Jim could not have left the house all day. He had probably only risen to use the bathroom.

"Mm, s'good," Jim mumbled, still working ineffectively at the buttons of Spock's shirt. He pressed forward to lick at Spock's neck, and Spock shivered at the sensation. The smell of alcohol made it strange; the clumsy, almost abstract way that Jim was doing it was almost disturbing.

"Jim. Jim, we have to talk…"

"In a bit," Jim said, winding his fingers into Spock's belt loops and rubbing their hips together, licking kisses up his neck. The alcohol had only slowed his reactions; Spock could feel a growing hardness beginning to dig into his hip. "H'ven't seen you all day – mished you. Whoa. Missed. Missed you."

He backed Spock into the wall of the hallway, still rubbing up against him languidly, beginning to work at the shirt buttons again, and Spock sighed heavily, wrapping his hands over Jim's.

"Jim, we _need _to talk. _Now_."

"In a _bit_," Jim persisted, almost whining. "J's wanna…"

He swallowed Spock's protest in a sloppy kiss, lapping at his lips and teeth clumsily. The taste of gin was _strong_, and Spock planted both hands into his chest and _pushed_, forcing several inches of space.

"Jim. _No_."

"_Spock_," Jim scowled. "Wh' th' hell? I j's missed you, I j's…"

"We _have _to talk, Jim," Spock said firmly. "This is getting out of hand."

"_What _is?" Jim demanded, folding his arms and looking belligerent. "Fact tha' I wanna…?"

"No," Spock snapped. "The fact that you are _drunk_. You have been drinking since I left for work. Have you even left the house?"

"N't this again," Jim muttered, scowling darkly. "Fuck's sake, can't you j's stop _nagging _f'r once?"

"Jim, I am _worried _about you, and…"

"S'not a fucking _problem_!" Jim snarled. "S'just a fucking drink! Nothing wrong with a fucking drink!"

"One, no; _all day_? Jim, how much have you had to drink?"

"S'none of your fucking b'siness!" Jim snapped. "Y'r not my fucking _mother_. Y'r m'_boyfriend_ but all y'ever do is fucking nag! Find something else to fucking do!"

Spock stiffened as though he'd been slapped. "It is my business, Jim; you are killing yourself with this, and whether you want to admit it or not, you have a serious problem."

"The s'rious pr'blem is _you_!" Jim shouted, blue eyes flashing as his tenuous hold on his temper snapped. "Y'just come home every fucking day and fucking niggle and poke and prod like I'm not fucking g'd enough for you! J'st because you've got no fucking clue how to loosen up once in a while, don't aspect – expect me to be the same!"

"J-Jim, I…"

"Y'don't want to talk t'me, you don't want t'be seen with me, all y'ever do is nag, you don't even want to fuck anymore!" Jim snapped, and suddenly a heavy hand landed between Spock's thighs and groped at him obscenely, causing a dark flush to rise in his face and the instinctive motion to retreat from the rough handling. "See! You can't fucking _stan' _me, and I don't know why I fuckin' bother anymore!"

He whirled away from Spock, seizing his jacket and keys from the hall closet and pushing past him to the door.

"'M goin' out," he snapped. "Fin' someone who_ does _fucking stand me."

"Jim," Spock whispered, but even to his own ears, he just sounded tired. It was an old fight, too old to be rehashed, too old to be gone over again and again.

The door slammed.

This would play out as it always did. Spock would wake up to Jim letting himself back in during the early hours. Sometimes he came to bed and sometimes he didn't, but they would not speak, and they slept apart even in the same bed. He would sleep through Spock going to work in the morning, and when Spock returned, he would be drunk again. Sometimes, they would ignore that the entire argument had ever taken place; sometimes, Jim would attempt to drunkenly apologise, but would perceive Spock's exhaustion and misery as something offensive, and another would begin.

It had become a cycle, and Spock knew that if it was not broken, one of them would be.

And most likely himself.


	28. The Second First Date

**Notes: Real life is real busy, but also real good. Have some happy vibes!**

* * *

><p><em>The Second First Date<em>

Jim pulled up in front of Spock's box house just as the front door opened and smiled nervously when Spock got into the car.

"So, you going to tell me where we're headed yet?" he asked.

"You will see," came the enigmatic response.

He'd had some very confusing clues for this. They were eating out, but Jim's usual t-shirt and jeans would apparently suffice. It was a busy place, but they would not be disturbed. And if Jim brought the bike, it would be stolen, but the car would be quite safe.

They didn't speak much, apart from Spock giving directions, until Jim pulled into a nondescript parking lot that seemed to serve several nearby businesses – a bowling alley, some nightclub that wasn't open yet, and…

"Oh my God," Jim said, and laughed.

A 1950s diner covered the rest of the lot, and Jim grinned delightedly. Just as he had almost quoted word-for-word how he had asked Spock on their first date all those years ago, Spock had replicated the date itself – Jim had dragged him to a 1950s diner in Cedar Rapids and swept him off his feet over the biggest strawberry smoothie in the States. And okay, this wasn't a cardboard cut out mirror image of the diner - the dimensions were all wrong, and Jim was pretty sure the music being piped out over the parking lot was actually from the sixties, not the fifties, but...

But _hell_, it was like their real first date. Again. In Minneapolis.

"Do they do strawberry smoothies for dessert?" he asked.

"I believe that they do," Spock said as they got out of the car, and Jim reached for his hand before aborting the motion hastily. "Jim. If you wish to…" Spock held out his own, and Jim fitted their fingers together hesitantly.

"You sure? I mean, I don't want to make you uncomfortable, or attract any attention or anything," he fretted.

"I am not uncomfortable with this," Spock returned smoothly. "And this diner is run by a couple with three grown children, all of whom are homosexuals. They have no issues with same-sex couples."

"All three?" Jim whistled, momentarily distracted. "That's…that is statistical clustering. Or something."

"Indeed."

"How'd you find this place?"

Spock flushed faintly. "I…work with their eldest son."

Jim's grip tightened on his hand. "He asked you out, didn't he?"

"…Yes, approximately eight months ago."

"Did you?" Jim asked. "I mean, go out with him?"

"Once," Spock said, "but I realised that it was hopeless and unfair to him to pretend that I was 'over' you."

Jim squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry."

"It is unimportant now," Spock said, shrugging it off - as he seemed to shrug everything off with enviable, _scary _calm - as they stepped into the diner and were immediately waved to a seat by a distracted waitress.

The diner was busy, but they were granted a table in one corner, out of the main bustle of the place, and where they could speak without raising their voices, but also without being much overheard. Slowly, when the other customers ignored them and the waitress didn't bat an eyelash at them either, Jim relaxed enough to inch a hand over the table to grasp Spock's again, toying with his fingers almost idly as they talked, rubbing the pads of his fingertips into the warm skin and soaking up the contact like a sponge. A dry sponge. In a desert.

And just as he had on their very first date, Spock blushed just a little, but didn't otherwise react to the attention.

"Hey," Jim said suddenly, halfway through a salad starter. "You think…maybe this could be our new anniversary?" He checked his watch and hummed. "April twenty-third?"

"We could…cheat, and keep both," Spock offered, and Jim grinned.

"_Cheat_? You're proposing cheating?"

"It would give us five celebrations per year, reasonably evenly spaced. Your birthday, our new anniversary, my birthday, our old anniversary, and Christmas."

"Okay," Jim beamed. "Which reminds me – your birthday. I mean, obviously if we're still going good and everything's…everything's good, um…do you want to, er, to go somewhere? Like we used to?"

Spock paused, and tilted his head, that unreadable look back in his eyes. _Studying_. "Perhaps we will see."

"Okay," Jim said hastily. "Okay. It was just an idea. Um, I mean, that's probably a little soon…"

"Jim," Spock's hand twitched in his. "Stop worrying."

Jim flushed and ducked his head. "Truth?"

Spock cocked his head.

"I can't," Jim said. "I just can't. I'm too nervous of messing this up because…because you shouldn't have given me this second chance. You really, really shouldn't. It's so stupid of you and one day - I hope - one day we'll proper argue about it. But you _did_, and I can't help but think…I can't mess this up."

"If I agree to a second date, no matter how well this one may or may not go, would you agree to stop worrying?" Spock asked. He should have sounded as though he was cutting a devious deal – which he _was _– but he sounded, as always, perfectly even and almost monotonous. That, at least, had not changed, and probably never would.

"…Yeah, okay," Jim said, and cracked a genuine smile.

They kept the conversation light and easy from that point on, the only hint of the purpose of their being there the gentle, absent ghosting of Jim's fingers over Spock's hand, and the occasional exchanged look that made Jim understand what Sulu meant by his accusation of them being disgustingly in love. The calculating expression never left Spock's face, and he was not entirely open - although not struggling so much as he had in the beginning - but that giddy happiness had crept back into Jim's psyche, and he found that he didn't care. It was like falling in love all over again - too stoked, too utterly _thrilled _that Spock was here with him - to care about anything else.

They were quiet through the main course, apart from the odd incident of Jim stealing fries, and resumed conversation over ice cream desserts. Which gave Jim bad, insane, crazy images of getting ice cream and licking it off Spock's chest. (Which, surprisingly, he'd never actually done.) It turned slowly to Riverside and what Spock had missed, and Jim's meets in Kalona.

"I'm still going," Jim said. "I'm going to go even if I get right past it, just in case."

"I never thought…"

Jim looked up when Spock broke off, and frowned. "What?"

"I simply…never thought that you would actually give it up," Spock admitted. "It is perhaps why I did not think that we would be able to resume anything – I did not believe that you would stop drinking."

"Well," Jim shrugged and rubbed Spock's fingers. "I did. And I'm not going to start again. And…and one day you'll believe me – you really will."

"I think that I am beginning to," Spock murmured, and Jim beamed.

"Here," he said. "I'm promising you right now – whatever happens, I'm staying off the booze. It's…it's not even wholly for you anymore. I was a complete mess and I was just fucking up my life and if I'm going to be good at anything, I need to stay off it. So…you know, whatever happens? I'll be sober. No matter what."

Spock turned his hand over to hold Jim's hand in return.

"Maybe one day you'll believe that too," Jim said. "Sorry, sorry, that sounded completely bitter…"

"It is alright," Spock said quietly. "And I have learned that when you truly put your mind to something, it is extremely unlikely that you will fail at your endeavour. You have a…ruthless approach."

"Well, if I could get you back," Jim said, "then there mustn't be any no-win scenarios. So…yeah, I guess you're right."

"I do not know about 'no win scenarios.'"

"You got one?"

"I believe so," Spock said, and _almost _smiled. "The odds, for example, of my persuading you to stop riding that motorcycle."

"Touché."

* * *

><p>Jim pulled the car up alongside Spock's box house, and put it into park without question.<p>

"Thanks for agreeing to this," he said, undoing his seatbelt and twisting in his seat to face Spock properly. "It means a lot to me."

"As it does to me," Spock said. "It was a most enjoyable evening."

"Yeah," a slow smile spread across Jim's face. "Our second first date, just like the first one. Only I didn't get ketchup on my shirt. Or slip on the wet floor in the bathroom."

Spock didn't laugh, but Jim _knew _that he wanted to.

"So, same time next week?" Jim asked, his smile softening. "It's supposed to be sunny, and I have ideas. You up for it?"

"Indeed," Spock said.

"Okay, I'm going to cut the small talk, and just…yeah," Jim murmured, and leaned over to kiss him soundly, cupping his face in both hands and dragging Spock along to bliss with him. It was a long, involved kiss that was _slow_, in a way that was not quite usual for Jim, and he felt the oxygen being leeched from his brain as surely as if he was being suffocated.

Spock shifted forward to support their weight better, and slid both hands around Jim's chest, fingers sliding over his shoulder blades and tracing his muscles lightly through his shirt. Jim broke the kiss long enough to note that Spock's eyes were closed and his lips swollen, before resuming it and burying his fingers into that usually perfect hair.

"Second-best first date ever," he murmured into his mouth, and Spock shifted to stare at him, not half an inch from his face.

"Second?" he murmured.

"Mm," Jim sucked on his bottom lip briefly before he added: "Iowa trumps Minnesota any day."

"Good _night_, Jim."


	29. Uphill

**Notes: Rapid update, because a) I remembered and b) I'm extremely bored. **

* * *

><p><em>Uphill<em>

And suddenly…

Suddenly, Jim found himself doing everything with a smile on his face again.

It was like when they had first started dating. Okay, Iowa City was a heckuva lot closer than Minneapolis, but it was very similar: almost nightly phone calls about their days and whatever else came to mind, and every weekend spent being, as Sulu put it, disgustingly happy.

Perhaps it was the gayest thing Jim had ever admitted, but he had missed long walks with Spock's hand discreetly tucked into the crease of his elbow.

Whatever he had missed, this was like the last five years had never happened. This was how they had been in the very beginning – still working out the limits and the rhythm, but viewing the entire process through insanely rose-tinted glasses. As pink as Sulu's mysterious and alarming nail polish. Or at least Jim was - he didn't think Spock ever really wore rose-tinted glasses, even the first time around, but Jim was so giddy with it he didn't much care.

After their first date, they had carried on very much in a similar vein – going for walks around the many lakes or exploring the Minnesotan countryside during the day, and going out for a meal in the evening. Jim was smug to notice that they were both the object of many envious looks when they ate out – and even once, amusingly, when they opted to get takeout and eat at Spock's and watch late-night television, and the delivery guy had looked like he wanted nothing more than to take a running leap onto the tiny couch and join them.

It was mostly during their walks that they began to unravel where they had gone wrong, and came to some ground rules in order to move forward and even begin actually tackling the root problems – namely the obvious, that Jim was not to drink, and the less obvious, that Spock would indulge his need to feel useful until they could work that one out properly.

Jim did make a conscious effort, however, to keep things slow and low-key. He was well aware of how he'd acted in the last few months, and more than anything was desperate to impress upon Spock how sex wasn't the core of it at all. Tempting as it was, when permitted into the box that was Spock's house, to just shove him into the bedroom and screw until neither of them knew anything about anything or anyone _ever again_, it would undoubtedly be a mistake.

Jim, however, had _never _been in the position of moving slow, sexually speaking.

True, it had taken nearly five months before they had had sex the first time around – but that was more due to the fact that Spock was a virgin (at least with men; Jim had his doubts about the mysterious Japanese chick back in Tokyo that Spock's old man wanted him to marry) and that Jim was seriously out of practice when it came to guys, having not experimented with or dated a man since he was about seventeen.

And they had built up to it pretty quickly. Spock had surprised the hell out of Jim by going down on him after their fourth date and very efficiently destroying a quarter of his brain cells via his balls. He hadn't been _shy_, so to speak – just nervous about the final act.

Now, they were both most definitely not virgins, and most definitely very aware of exactly what would get each other going and lead to, frankly, exquisite sex.

And yet Jim was _determined _to take it slowly.

He knew how it might come across – that he had missed Spock for the mind-blowing (and door-rattling, wall-cracking, floor-creaking, bedspring-pinging, table-breaking and couch-collapsing) sex and nothing else. And knowing that Spock had never had the most _amazing _self-esteem in the universe (and Jim _knew _he'd made that worse with his behaviour) he was absolutely determined to not give that impression. And then, of course, was how their sex life had been in the end: Jim had hovered the blurry edges of coercion more than once, and desperately didn't want to find that his prior forceful behaviour had..._scared _Spock.

Jesus Christ, he didn't want to find that.

But dear God, he didn't know the meaning of blue balls until he had to pull off halfway back to Riverside one Sunday morning and have a quick one off the wrist in a lay-by hoping desperately that a cop wouldn't drive past.

He kept it deliberately tame. He didn't even _attempt _to stay out of Spock's personal space (Jim had difficulty staying out of _anyone's _personal space, never mind Spock's) and gave in perfectly happily to the urges to hug him or hold his hand. Cuddling on a tiny couch had distinct advantages, as did movie theatres. (He lost count of the amount of movies he faked an interest in seeing just to be able to cling onto Spock in public and not be sneered at by random strangers.)

Kissing was the dodgy one.

Jim Kirk _loved _kissing. It was easily right up there in his top five activities. He had once missed the entirety of the second Lord of the Rings movie (and the extended edition, too!) because he'd spent the whole movie necking with Spock on the couch. They hadn't even brought each other off, _or _removed any clothing.

He just…there was something brilliant about kissing, something immense about it. It could be whatever you wanted – playful, aggressive, serious, sweet, whatever. And it was _intimate_. There was something trusting and vulnerable about kissing; Jim felt _exposed _when kissing, and he liked the idea that whoever he was kissing did as well.

The problem with kissing was that it was entirely too easy to get carried away.

That was, after all, how their first (and second, and third) remotely sexual encounters had happened - idle kissing had gotten carried away. And only two 'date weekends' in, it almost happened again, only aborted because Jim fought to get himself under control and let go.

He got a confused look for it, but Spock didn't question it.

He should have known better, though, and in the middle of May, Spock broke the sexual stalemate in true Spock style – without even mentioning that he'd noticed it.

A kissing session had occurred in the middle of a crappy made-for-TV movie that they had opted to watch instead of venturing outside in a rather impressive thunderstorm, and Jim was startled when Spock suddenly shifted and swung a leg over his thighs to straddle his lap.

"Spock, what…?"

He was soundly kissed as familiar long fingers deftly undid his jeans and began to stroke him through the cotton of his briefs. Spock had forgotten nothing, his nails lightly ghosting over the head and causing a hot spark to dart into Jim's spine and straighten his posture.

"Oh God," he moaned around Spock's tongue, and hastily fumbled for Spock's zipper as Spock began to jack him in long, firm strokes. "_Shit_, Spock, oh my God…"

"Please stop talking," Spock murmured into his mouth, beginning to rock over Jim's lap as Jim's hands tucked themselves into his boxers. Kneeling over Jim, he was suddenly a head taller, and it was a strange sensation to have to crane his neck upward to kiss him.

Jim did as he was told, offering messy kisses around groans and quiet hisses of half-forgotten pleasure. Spock cut off the kissing, arching with a groan and increasing the speed of his own hands when Jim stroked a finger along his perineum and cupped his balls expertly.

"_Jim_…"

Jim thrust up into Spock's hands quite suddenly, almost throwing him off, and suddenly they were rutting in earnest, seeking friction wherever they could find it and breathing loudly through their noses as their mouths were kept otherwise busy – and then Jim arched and cried out, coming under Spock's hands for the first time in almost a year and a half.

When he came back to himself, his hands were hot and damp with Spock's semen, and Spock's breathing was loud and harsh in his ear and he laughed, kissing the nearest ear lightly.

"Missed me?" he whispered, and Spock buried his face into Jim's neck to leave the imprint of a smile there.

"Indeed," he murmured.

"God, I'd forgotten all those little sounds you make," Jim whispered, wiping his hands off on Spock's boxers and tucking him back into his pants, but not bothering to zip them up. He ran both hands up that lean back and squeezed him in a tight hug, feeling the strangely wonderful sensation of his ribs flexing in the circle of Jim's arms. "Forgotten how you feel, but not how _good _you feel…"

"That makes no sense."

"Doesn't have to," Jim murmured. "C'mon. Shower. This is fucking disgusting."

And so it was that Spock broke the stalemate – though Jim kept it broken by blowing him in the shower, and again the following weekend.

And yet Jim still kept it relatively tame – he backed off at full sex, and earned himself several raised eyebrows and comments in doing so, but…

It was odd.

He had never believed in the significance of a first time. The first time that they had screwed, it had been awkward and clumsy and probably hurt Spock a fair bit, and it hadn't been all that satisfying anyway. First times were like that – they were never, ever as good as people made them out to be.

But it hadn't been a significant thing. It had been the two of them too horny to settle for mutual hand jobs, and one spring afternoon when there was nothing on the TV in Spock's box apartment in Iowa City, and a creaky bed and too much incredibly unerotic fumbling with a condom.

In the following years, there'd been significant sex – celebratory sex, anniversary sex, make-up sex, the first time that Jim had bottomed, moving-in sex…but first time sex? That had never been significant.

Before.

Suddenly, Jim was waiting for some stupid, girly-as-fuck 'right time' that didn't actually exist. He wanted to make it special – okay, great, sure, but why did that have to mean _not in Spock's box house_? – and he wanted to _wait_.

That was the worst of it: his case of blue balls was his _own _fault.

But somehow, Jim had gotten it into his head that sex – real, honest-to-God, break-the-headboard-with-the-pounding sex – was going to be the marker. The point at which they stopped going uphill, and hit the crest that they'd been riding before Jim got fired.

When _they _were back.


	30. 3rd August 2009

**Notes: **

* * *

><p><em>3rd August 2009<em>

The sun was too bright, and pierced through Spock's skull painfully as he pulled the car up into the driveway. The headache was growing, the intensity beginning to spread out from its point of origin, and he resigned himself to the fact that this was going to become a migraine in short order.

He had taken a half-day from work in light of the painful headache and that even the division manager, a ferociously ruthless woman known only as 'Number One' and apparently not in possession of a real name, had asked if he was feeling well.

He shakily let himself into the house, locking the door behind him and toeing off his shoes before slipping upstairs in the hope that Jim would not notice him. The television was off, but the breeze indicated that the back door was open and there were two empty bottles on the coffee table.

When he went to close the bedroom curtains against the sun, he looked down and glimpsed Jim lounging in the garden, speaking to someone on his phone. Spock ruthlessly suppressed a wave of bitterness – Jim was_ always _on the phone these days, and sometimes Spock didn't wonder if Omaha had really been an isolated incident – and drew the curtains to, plunging the room into a soothing darkness before dropping onto the bed, the pounding in his head building like a drum.

The back door banged loudly off the doorframe, and Spock sighed, burying his face into the pillow. The material was too cool; he wondered vaguely if he was actually ill, and counted the footsteps on the stairs.

"Spock?"

The door creaked open and footsteps padded across the carpet before a hand came to brush over his hair and fingers rub at the thin skin behind his exposed ear.

"Spock? What are you doing home?" his voice was clear and articulate, for perhaps the first time in weeks, and though Spock could faintly smell the permanent sour stink of alcohol, he had obviously not yet imbibed much.

He was struck with the quite ridiculous urge to cry.

"Don't you feel well?" Jim persisted, that hand resting against his forehead for a moment before resuming that soothing stroke. "Spock? Do you need me to call a doctor?"

"No," Spock croaked, not daring to crack his eyes open and admit the light that must have been let in from the landing. "It is a migraine."

"_Oh_," Jim murmured, his voice dropping until it was little more than a low, soothing rumble. The mattress dipped as he perched on the edge of the bed. "Is it really bad yet?"

He did not answer, curling in on himself, the pain radiating through his skull and making every bone above the neck feel in danger of cracking and collapsing inward on his brain under a tightening, _vice_-like _pressure_...

"Ssh," Jim whispered, and Spock faintly realised that he'd made some kind of noise. "Ssh, it's alright. How long have you been in pain?"

"Since...since this morning," Spock whispered; even his _teeth _ached.

"Okay," a kiss was pressed to his forehead, and that strange urge to cry or cling or have _some _kind of outburst rose up again briefly. _This was Jim_, and Spock found that he had missed him somehow, even though they had been under the same roof. "I'm going to get you a few things, and then I'll be right back, okay gorgeous?"

He closed the door behind him, leaving Spock cocooned in a cool, comfortable darkness. After a beat, the faint hum of the air conditioning kicked in and Spock allowed himself to drift slightly – to the point where he was jerked from a light doze when the bedroom door opened again.

"Come on," Jim coaxed, easing him upright before pressing the pills and a half-full glass into his hands, sitting on the edge of the bed to assist him. "Get those down you. They'll take the edge off."

Spock obediently swallowed, but grimaced when his stomach rolled, and Jim made a sympathetic noise.

"Feeling sick?" he asked.

"Yes," Spock whispered, leaning forward to rest his head against Jim's shoulder.

"It's alright," Jim murmured. "I brought up a basin so if you need to be sick, you don't have to go anywhere."

"Thank you."

"Come on, sweetheart, let's get you out of your suit," he said, efficiently stripping Spock of his suit jacket, tie and shirt before easing him back into the pillows and working at his belt. "Did someone drop you off? Do you want me to go up to the city to get your car?"

"No," Spock swallowed against the nausea. "I drove."

"You _drove _with this?" Jim said, his voice rising, but it dropped again when Spock grimaced. "Alright. We'll talk about that later."

He got Spock down to his boxers and drew up the blankets, essentially tucking him in. Placing the basin by the bed level with his head, he dropped another kiss to his temple, tapping the back of Spock's hand to get his attention again.

"Do you need anything else?" Jim murmured, stroking the back of his hand soothingly. Spock cracked open his eyes to peer up at him, and Jim offered him a smile. "I'll stay in today and look after you, okay sweetheart?"

He tried to put Spock's hand down and rise, but Spock twisted his fingers until he gripped Jim's wrist tightly.

"Stay."

Jim looked vaguely startled for a moment, and he twisted his hand to squeeze Spock's fingers. "You want me to _stay_? You sure, baby? I don't want to disturb..."

"Please," Spock whispered through clenched teeth, and the spike that speaking drove through his skull dragged another faint noise from his throat.

"Okay, okay," Jim soothed, gingerly climbing over him to settle on his other side. "Ssh, sweetheart, it's alright." He kept up a low murmur as he lay down and drew Spock into a loose embrace, squirming one arm under the sheets to rub calming circles into his stomach in an attempt to quell the nausea. "There we go, gorgeous. This okay?"

Spock nodded, turning his head to press his cheek to the cool skin of Jim's arm.

"Go on, go to sleep. I'll stay here if you want me to."

"Thank you," Spock murmured, shifting until their shoulders touched. Jim curled along his side, one hand on his stomach and the other arm tucked beneath his head, cradling his skull in the elbow.

"Don't thank me," Jim whispered. "I like taking care of you. I like you letting me. Makes me feel useful."

"You are always useful," Spock murmured, both hands clasping over Jim's on his stomach.

Jim shifted a little closer to press a kiss to his cheek. "Go to sleep, baby," he coaxed. "I'll be here when you wake up, and then we'll see if a heat pack and some tea doesn't help."

Spock dozed, Jim's hand on the bare skin of his belly and warm breathing washing over his shoulder a balm – a missed, precious contact, absent in so much of their interaction lately – that made the pain and the nausea somehow…worth it.


	31. A Mother's Anger

**Notes: Only five more installments after this to go! **

* * *

><p><em>A Mother's Anger<em>

By the end of May, Jim was almost ready to say that he was happy.

He still woke up every morning and remembered that he'd slept alone with a pang. He still ached a little inside if he opened the wrong cupboard and was confronted with the abandoned teabags or the un-rotated tins. And he still came home from work some days and had a deep, deep yearning for _just the one beer_.

But he didn't do it, and it didn't matter nearly so much. He had permanently switched back to the full weekend off from the store, and had come to irrationally love the five hour trip to Minneapolis every Saturday morning, sometimes setting off before dawn just to buy a couple more precious hours.

But Jim's bliss was punctured quite rudely by a phone call in late May, just after he'd come home from work on a Wednesday night and was going over the plans for the garden again, wondering whether now would be a good time to get the first of the trellises up before the rain came next week.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Kirk?"

"Speaking."

"My name is Amanda Grayson."

For a moment, the name meant nothing – and a moment later, his memory dredged it up, mostly through the surname, and he felt like he'd swallowed a rock. A boulder. Most of the state of Colorado.

In the four years that they had been together, Jim had met Spock's father a grand total of zero times, and his mother only once more. By the time Amanda Grayson had paid a visit, sick to death of not knowing the young man that her son had apparently moved to rural Iowa to be with, their relationship had already been cracking.

When Amanda had visited, Jim had been unemployed for two months. He had been in a very bad mood, and had not been best pleased with Spock bringing home a visitor. They had had a loud argument in the hall, Jim shouting about being given some warning and it wasn't fair of Spock to just spring this on him and why did Spock feel the need to bring guests back when Jim never got any time with him anyway because he worked so much.

She had frowned silently at him throughout the whole debacle – all five foot six of her, loose clothing hiding her from the summer heat and big dark eyes just like her son's, before she'd turned on her heel and walked out, asking Spock to see her to the car.

_They'd _then had an argument on the driveway, with all the neighbours listening in, and then she'd left. Jim hadn't found out until a good couple of weeks later who she'd actually been, and she had never come again.

And now she was on the other end of his phone, and Jim had never felt so nervous in his whole life.

"Um," he said. "Mrs. Grayson, erm…what can I do for you?"

"You can explain to me," she said, "exactly what you think you are doing."

Her voice had the same hint of an accent that Spock's did if he spoke in his mother tongue too much, and an identical undercurrent of pure _titanium _that was whipped out when he was especially angry, and at the point where other people would start shouting and breaking things.

"I'm…afraid you're going to have to clarify," Jim said, sitting down on the bed and taking a deep, deep breath.

"I take care to regularly speak with my son, Mr. Kirk, and you can imagine my _surprise _when I was informed this morning that he would be unavailable to speak for the weekend because _you _would be visiting."

She said 'you' the same way that other people referred to dog shit on the carpet, especially obnoxious Texan barflies, or convicted paedophiles.

"So I ask again, Mr. Kirk: what exactly do you think that you are doing?"

"I'm trying to make things right again," Jim said quietly, and knew immediately that he'd said the wrong thing.

"Mr. Kirk, I applauded your decision to apologise to my son. I respected you for that action. I do _not_, however, agree with this in the _slightest_!"

"Mrs. Grays…"

"You left my son homeless and penniless. He could have died on the streets because of you; you could have killed him. And if I have read between the lines correctly, you nearly killed him that night regardless of the aftermath. I know my son better than he thinks, Mr. Kirk, and I have a fairly good idea of what happened."

Jim swallowed the lump in his throat. "I know."

"I did not expect my son to be foolish enough to resume a relationship which was, quite frankly, _abusive_…"

Jim winced, but took the blow.

"…and if I had any proof whatsoever, I would have you arrested for coerci…"

"Hey!" Jim interrupted hotly, his spine snapping straight again at the accusation. "Don't you _dare _accuse me of forcing him into this! I forced him into _nothing _– it's _always _been his choice! I asked, and he accepted, and there was no goddamn _coercion _about it!"

She seemed momentarily quieted – or stunned, Jim couldn't tell – by his outburst and he rushed on before she could speak again.

"As for…as for the ways things _were_, they're different now," Jim said hotly. "It's never going to be like that again. We're working things out, and…"

"For how long?" she snapped. "I think that you proved yourself as dangerous to my son, Mr. Kirk, and all it would take is one more slip."

"There's not going to _be _another slip," Jim insisted. "Mrs. Grayson, I would sooner kill myself than put Spock back into that position. It's never going to happen again. I'm sober, I'm _staying _that way, and I'm not pushing for _anything_. We're taking it slow, and we're starting over, and…"

"And what are you like sober, Mr. Kirk?" she had stopped flaring up at every other syllable, but that cold undercurrent was still there. "Because I don't believe that I know."

"…I love him," Jim said quietly.

There was a short silence; he could very faintly hear her breathing.

"You never saw…saw the way we were," Jim said quietly. "You just saw the shit part when I'd gotten out of control – you never saw the bit before that."

"So tell me," she commanded.

Jim swallowed, searching for something, then laughed brokenly at a particular memory that cropped up. "There's this stupid song that has the line 'I've never been to Boston in the fall.' Spock _hates _that song, so I'd play it in the car on loop to annoy him. And then offhand he said if he had to listen to such nonsense, at least it was true nonsense, so…so when we got home, I booked us a weekend trip to Boston for his birthday, even though I'd already sorted another trip. We just celebrated it twice that year."

Mrs. Grayson was still silent, so Jim carried on.

"He once talked me into going to one of his boring work party things for New Year, and I ended up getting really jealous because of this pretty little intern who kept flirting with him, and he was basically laughing at me the whole night – I could tell – but he still kissed me at midnight in front of all his colleagues even though he wasn't really comfortable with PDAs yet."

She made a very faint noise, but Jim was on a roll, lost in the resurgence of happiness that had curled in the middle of his chest as he dragged the memories up.

"I fully intended to propose to him on our third anniversary. We can't get married in Iowa but I would have gone anywhere to marry him. I would have lived wherever to be married to him. But I didn't, because we weren't doing so well then, and I never wanted to trap him into something that he wasn't totally happy with, so I didn't. I wasn't a _completely _inconsiderate bastard."

"I believe you are now quoting the letter that you wrote me."

"Probably," Jim mumbled. "I love your son, Mrs. Grayson. I really do. I'll always love him, and I'm not going to ask questions if he decides to give me another chance. I'm the luckiest guy in the world, twice over, and I'm never going to take that for granted again."

"You did once."

"Yeah – _once_," Jim stressed. "I've learned from my mistakes and I'm never going to make them again. I've completely turned my life around and if I'm only ever allowed to love him at a distance, I will, and if I get to actually rebuild a life with him, then I'll take the chance and I'll do everything I can to make him happy. To make _both _of us happy."

"You have to understand, Mr. Kirk, that…"

"No, I don't," Jim sighed heavily, feeling tired at arguing this again and again and again – not just with Amanda Grayson, but _himself_. She wasn't alone in wondering about whether he could keep the promise. "All I have to understand is that I am _not _going to slip up again. I don't care how damn hard it is - and it _is _hard - but I'm _not _going to. I'm _never _going to put him at risk again. I'm working through all those problems, and _I love him_. And moreover, Mrs. Grayson, he loves me, and maybe I don't deserve that, but that's the way it is and I am never, _ever _going to mistreat that love again."

"_Mr. Kirk_," she said stiffly. "Given your…history…I cannot say that I will ever be comfortable taking your words at face value. How can I trust what you're telling me?"

"You just have to trust your son with this one," Jim offered, and she suddenly snorted in a surprising and distinctly unladylike fashion.

"Trust Spock with his own welfare? Please," she said. "I love my son, Mr. Kirk, but even I have to state that he does not have the best survival instincts that there are. I cannot trust him not to put himself back in danger because he claims to be in love…"

"He loves me," Jim said with fierce conviction – and he believed it, too. There was no other explanation, no other way to rationalise what was going on, and for four years he had _known_, known without a hint of a doubt, that Spock loved him just as much as he had loved Spock.

And he still knew.

The realisation that he _still knew_ was…jarring, almost. It was an intense heat that suddenly burned itself into his heart, curling around the major veins and arteries there and falling into rhythm with his pulse. It set up residence in his chest, to be carried for the rest of his life, and he found himself suddenly beaming uncontrollably.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I have to go."

He hung up before Mrs. Grayson could answer him, and scrolled off the shortest and fastest text in history – a simple 'x' – to Spock's cell, before falling back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling – and beginning, without real reason or even sanity – to laugh.


	32. Promises

**Notes: I'm pulling an all-nighter in the library in order to get work done. Cheer me up and send me love.**

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><p><em>Promises<em>

_The bottle connected with the side of Spock's head sharply, the jolt shooting up Jim's arm, and it exploded in his hand, bursting over that dark hair until it was spotted with glittering glass and the sickening gleam of red – bright, almost glowing in the glare from the kitchen lights, splattering across the counters like a macabre artwork, streaking; it was everywhere, pouring from Spock's scalp, washing over his neck and shoulder like a waterfall, and he collapsed to his knees as Jim reached for a second bottle and brought it down again, again, again – then it smashed too, and Spock crumpled to the floor, drowning in a sea of red, a wash of it, a tide creeping up to Jim's knees and flooding them in the icy cold of death…_

Jim woke with a scream that at any other time in his life, he would have found embarrassing. Half a second later, he was up out of the bed and into the ensuite, and promptly threw up in the toilet.

"Oh God, oh God, _Spock_..." he whimpered, shivering, then vomited again, his stomach rolling at the memory-turned-dream. It could so easily have played out that very same way, so easily have become…become…

When his stomach finally stopped rolling, he rinsed out his mouth and dragged his duvet downstairs into the living room, wrapping it back around himself on the couch and reaching for his cell phone where it had been abandoned on the coffee table the night before.

It was six in the morning. Even for Jim, this was antisocial, but…but…but…

He dialled.

The phone rang six times before the line crackled and there was a brief silence before Spock's voice, ridiculously clear considering that he must have been sleeping, said: "…Jim?"

Jim took a long, shuddering breath and barely managed to keep the tears at bay.

"_Jim_?" there was a distinctly worried undertone, and a rustle of sheets as though Spock had sat up in bed.

"Sorry," Jim choked. "Sorry, just…shit, sorry."

"What is the matter?"

"I…I just…fuck, this is fucking stupid…"

"Jim," Spock's voice was stern. "_Tell me_."

"I had a nightmare," Jim said, and coughed out a wet laugh. "Told you it was stupid."

"What was the nightmare about?"

"Spock…"

"Jim."

Jim swallowed and closed his eyes. And opened them again when that bloody splatter forced its way back into his imagination. "J-January the eighteenth."

There was a long pause, followed by: "I see."

Jim choked back a sob. "I could have killed you. I nearly _did_."

"Jim. Jim, calm down. It did not happen."

"_How_? What…what in the hell did you…I…you should have…"

"I called for a taxi from the store and went to a medical facility at Davenport. They released me the following morning, and I loaned a car and drove to Chicago."

Jim took a deep breath, nearly choking with the tears in the middle of it. "You ran away to Chicago?"

"Temporarily, yes. I informed my manager of the need to relocate immediately, and was given a post in Minneapolis after two weeks."

"How did you…?"

"My mother sent money," Spock said, and after a pause added: "I…suggest that you do not attempt to placate her for at least a year, possibly two. She is quite angry with the both of us."

"Yeah, I guessed," Jim sniffed, rubbing his hands across his eyes. "I can't blame her."

"Jim…"

"Spock, I…I beat you and I t-tried to rape you, and I could have _killed_ you."

"…Jim."

"Why the hell are you taking me back?" Jim blurted out.

There was a long silence, and a heavy sigh over the rustling of sheets before Spock spoke again, low and even: "Do you remember that I once said that you…frightened me, when you were drunk?"

The hot burn reached up into Jim's throat again and he croaked: "Yeah."

"Before you lost control of the issue, I would never have predicted becoming afraid of you," Spock said quietly. "You were simply not threatening in any way towards me. Even if we fought and you became angry or lost your temper, I did not harbour any suspicions that you would ever turn that anger on me – because you were still, however angry, in control. But when you began to drink heavily, it was easy to see that you had no idea what you were doing. You seemed to lose any idea that it was _me_ – and I began to lose sight of _you_."

Jim could hardly breathe – he hardly _dared _to breathe.

"The first time that you struck out at me, I was…more surprised than I was afraid or injured, but I realised then that this was not the same man that I loved. I attempted to bring the problem to your attention but you waved it off and I soon began to dread returning home to find you drunk and possibly angry…"

"_Spock_…"

"I sought refuge in work, which made you drunker and angrier, and it came to a head that evening that I could not deny. If not that night, Jim, one night you _would _quite possibly kill me."

"S-so…so why," Jim swallowed with an audible gulping noise, "why the hell d-d-did you take me _back_?"

"Because the man who begged for my forgiveness and my understanding was not the man that beat me on January the eighteenth," Spock said simply.

"_W-what_?"

"That man that I met in the café was the same man that stopped at my desk in Iowa City and clumsily asked for a date," Spock said evenly. "It was the same man that proposed a move with a keyring. It was the same man who used my tie as a reel whenever it suited him, and it was the same man who dropped out of work early and drove to the office to collect me after I mentioned a colleague making inappropriate sexual overtures during a phone call in my lunch break."

Jim flushed, remembering the incident and smiling despite himself.

"Do you remember the first time that you had to handle me with a migraine?"

Jim's smile widened a fraction. "Yeah...first time I heard you swear. And then you threw up on me. Twice."

"And yet you stayed. You called in sick to the garage and remained in my apartment with me. You cleaned up when I vomited, you rose every hour to brew fresh tea, and you offered to forcibly silence my upstairs neighbour when she decided to play loud music in the evening."

"Would have done it, too," Jim mumbled, gnawing on his thumbnail.

"Indeed," Spock's voice was warm. "We had been together for six weeks, and yet you insisted upon taking care of me as though it had been six years, despite the fact that I am perfectly capable of coping with my migraines without you."

Jim flushed. "Yeah, well...that still doesn't..."

"That was the man who called me in Minneapolis. It was _you_, Jim, the man who loved me and posed no threat. I have been as cautious as I feel is necessary, and I have…come to trust you again. I do not feel the need to constantly watch my behaviour or yours, and while it may take time to re-establish our equilibrium, I believe that it can be done. As long as the alcohol does not make a return, then…I see no reason _not _to take you back."

Jim choked again, and inhaled sharply through his nose.

"Jim?"

"You have to make me a promise," he breathed wetly.

"Which is?"

"If I ever, _ever _get drunk around you again, no matter h-how friendly or what-the-fuck-ever, you have to go. You have to run. Please, please promise me that. Promise you won't stick around if I drink again. _Please_."

"I promise, Jim."

"And you...you have to let me do things for you sometimes. Just...little shit, you know, like change the lightbulbs or whatever, but...we were always okay when I could take care of you for a little bit, so...can you trust me with that? Please?"

"I can."

"A-and if you have to go, if you want to leave me your email or your phone number, fine, but you _can't _tell me where you're going – you have to get out. _Please_. Spock, I'm serious, I w-wanted to fucking _kill _myself last time, and if I ever do _anything _like that again…"

There was a sudden, sharp inhalation, and Jim stopped dead.

"Spock?"

"I…"

"Spock," Jim's voice cracked. "Oh God. Please tell me you didn't…"

"Jim…"

"Spock, shut up! J-just…tell me the truth. Did you…did you try to…commit…?"

"No."

"Did you…hurt yourself?"

Another pause.

"_Spock_."

"Once. The night of the nineteenth, in a hotel in Chicago."

"Oh God," Jim whispered, beginning to shake again. "Oh my God…and…and since?"

"No."

"You _swear_?"

"I promise you, Jim, it was the once, and not again."

Jim took a deep breath and a long shiver, and whispered: "I made you promise me then, and I'm making you promise me again: if you _ever _feel like that again, you _have _to tell me. _Please_. If I…if I caused…"

"I promise, Jim. And I am fine. It was the once, and a long time ago, and I have not felt the urge to do so since."

"You promise me?"

"I promise."

"Thank you," Jim breathed, pressing his face to the phone as though he could reach through it. "Th…that's three you've made me. Do I have to promise anything?"

"Simply that you will not return to drinking."

"Promise," Jim said instantly. "If I fall off the wagon, it's right back on and Sulu's on orders to slap me stupid – and you are, too. But…"

"But?"

"I think you'll be enough, you know?" Jim whispered. "I went through all of this shit just to say sorry and now…now you've given me the second chance, I'm not going to do anything to mess it up. I'm not going to risk it, because I should never have gotten you back but I _did_, and…I don't think you know how much that means to me."

"I think that I do."

"Really?"

"Yes, Jim. Approximately as much as it means to me. It was never _easy_, leaving you. It would have been very easy to return – but it was simply too dangerous, and I forced myself to stay away."

"And you'll run again if you ever think it's dangerous."

"…Yes."

"Too slow."

"Yes, Jim. I have promised."

"Good," Jim managed a shaky smile. "I'm sorry I woke you up for this shit."

"I believe that much of it…needed to be said."

"Yeah…yeah, maybe," Jim mumbled, yawning. "Are…are you still up for the weekend? I can bring that new boxset that I mentioned."

"That will be fine, Jim. I look forward to seeing you."

"I might still be a bit watery."

"I have never minded you being 'watery'," and Spock was definitely finding this amusing now, and Jim snorted.

"You're cruel."

"Apparently so."

"I'll…I'll let you go. And Spock?"

"Yes, Jim?"

"…Thank you."


	33. 18th January 2010

**Notes: This is the _last _interlude.**

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><p><em>18th January 2010<em>

Jim woke with a groan when the bed shifted and he felt the warmth drag itself away. He reached out sleepily, his hangover interfering with his fine motor skills, and was met with empty air. Cracking his eyes open, he squinted to see Spock buttoning his shirt at the dresser and frowned.

"Sp'ck…"

Spock didn't so much as glance his way.

Jim winced as his memory kicked in. He'd staggered in at one o'clock in the morning from he couldn't even remember where, thoroughly waking Spock in the process, and had pestered and poked for sex until Spock had given in out of sheer exhaustion. Jim wasn't even entirely sure he'd brought Spock off at all.

"Spock…" he crawled to the end of the bed and caught Spock's shirt, tugging lightly.

"Jim, I have to go to work," came the tired response.

"Spock, please, look at me," Jim begged.

When he did, Jim wished he hadn't asked. There were dark circles under Spock's eyes, smudged and worn and ground in like they'd always been there, and he didn't look at Jim with affection or indulgence or love. He looked at him as though steeling himself, as though preparing for another battle in a long line of them – and Jim suddenly felt like a complete shit.

"C'mere," he breathed, tugging on the shirt until Spock sat on the end of the bed rather than tear it, but he kept his back turned and his posture stiff. Jim paid it no mind, wrapping his arms around his waist and pressing his forehead to the back of Spock's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

Spock said nothing.

"I'm really sorry," Jim murmured. "I know we're having problems, and I know sometimes I get out of control, but…but it'll get better. I sent off a whole bunch of applications last week – someone's bound to offer me _something_, and then I'll take you out and spoil you like I should be able to, and…"

"I have to go to work," Spock interrupted.

Jim frowned, and stroked his fingers over the cotton-covered stomach under his hands. "Spock, come on. You're stressed and you're unhappy and you're going to make yourself sick. You're tired and you've lost weight, and…just stay home one day. Just stay home today. I'll bring you breakfast in bed, and we'll curl up together and watch daytime TV, and you'll feel better for some relaxation. _We'll _feel better."

"I cannot."

"Yes, you _can_."

"No, I cannot," Spock snapped. "I cannot because I need to earn _money_, Jim, money that you are drinking away."

"Hey, I don't drink _that_ much."

"When last night is the _norm_, I would say that you do," Spock deflated as suddenly as he'd flared up, and pressed the heel of one hand to his face. "You are drinking yourself to death, Jim. You are drinking _us _to death, and I…"

Jim let go, a cold shock running through him, as if he'd plunged his head into a bucket of ice water and the chill had shot down his spine with painful intensity.

"I need to go to work," Spock whispered, and rose again, reaching for his pants.

"What are you saying?" Jim breathed, white-faced and tense.

"I am saying that I…I do not think that I can cope with this much longer," Spock said quietly, not looking Jim in the face as he fumbled with his belt. "When you are drunk, you are unpleasant, you are forceful, you are inconsiderate, and you can be violent – and you are not the man that I fell in love with."

"You're leaving me?" Jim whispered, a low tremor beginning to work its way through his system.

"No," Spock said, doing his tie with deft, distracted movements. "But if this continues…"

Jim reached for him, and was stopped cold by his next words.

"Sometimes, Jim…sometimes, I am…_afraid _of you."

A broken, strained sound crept from Jim's throat, entirely of its own volition, and he came up off the bed to wrap his arms around Spock's torso and _cling_ with the desperate might of a man seeing the end of the world and knowing that there was very little that he could do to stop it.

"I have to go to work," Spock said, and worked his way free.

"Tonight. We'll…we'll talk about it tonight. We will, right? You'll…you'll come back tonight, right?" Jim begged.

"Yes, Jim, I will."

"Then we'll talk about it. We'll…we'll go over it like…like _adults _and we'll sort it out," he pleaded, clutching at Spock's arm even as he headed for the bedroom door.

And a moment later, he was gone, forgoing breakfast in order to escape Jim's grasp quicker, and left Jim standing at the top of the stairs, listening to the rumble of a car engine start to break apart his world.

"We'll talk about it," he whispered through gritted teeth and a clenched fist against his lips. This would not break them apart. This would not wreck them. He would not _lose _him over something so silly as alcohol and the lack of a job and some little tension. It wasn't permanent. It _could _be sorted, and they _would _sort it. "We'll _talk about it_."

They wouldn't.


	34. The Sensation of Falling

**Warning: explicit sexual content.**

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><p><em>The Sensation of Falling<em>

July hit in a heatwave, thick and dry, hanging over the state like an arid blanket and slowing life to a crawl without warning, effort or remorse. The store was crowded with people wanting iced drinks and anything from the freezers, and for the first time, Jim was glad he wasn't working in the garage.

The yard was almost completed, the trellises set up and the path to the bench having been gravelled the week before, and Jim regretted leaving the most arduous work until last, even though it was necessary: the planting.

He had invited Spock down for the weekend to help – or as Jim had proposed it, sit and watch Jim sweat – and while he looked forward to Spock's arrival, as he always did, he was not looking forward to the actual work.

He had forgotten, however, of Spock's heritage.

He pulled up in his car, with the windows closed and wearing a light jacket, at eleven o'clock that morning, and Jim had only been able to gape from the porch. He was even wearing pants instead of shorts, and when he toed off his shoes in the hall, there were definitely _socks_.

"You are actually insane," Jim told him. "You drove in this heat, like that?"

Spock only looked faintly amused. "I have experienced far worse summers in Tokyo. As the heat today a dry heat, it is actually more comfortable here."

"You're still insane."

Jim had invited him to sit in the shade under the overhang in the yard and watch Jim sweat, but events turned out to be reversed – only Spock, Jim swore blind, didn't break a sweat. He worked rhythmically, ignoring the overwhelming air temperature and the blinding sun, giving Jim the most delicious views of his backside and naked torso.

It was like some weird cross between heaven and hell.

Eventually – after nearly five hours of working and breaking a sweat by just _thinking _about manual labour in this heat, never mind actually _doing _it – Jim retreated indoors and dug up some ice cream from the freezer, and broke the frankly meditative planting with a bowl of strawberry-flavoured dessert. Which Jim didn't even like, so God knows why it was in his freezer.

"Come into the shade," he said. "It's nearly four. I'll whip up some dinner soon and we can sit out and eat it here."

"I…should be going soon," Spock said, though he took the offered bowl and joined Jim on the garden bench. They'd had sex on this bench once, three years ago - impulsive, bones-jumping sex - and Jim had had splinters in his ass. He still couldn't look Dr. M'Benga from the local surgery in the eye.

"You could…stay the night again," Jim offered. "There's still a spare room."

Spock said nothing.

"Stay the night?" Jim pleaded, brushing Spock's ankle with his own. "We could go up to that diner outside Cedar Rapids that you like for breakfast. Please?"

Spock took a ridiculously long time to swallow a spoonful of melting ice cream, and then nodded. "Very well," he said quietly.

Jim didn't push his luck, and turned the conversation to the wallflowers that he was going to weave into the trellises along the wall of the house and around the kitchen door. After a little while, Spock's quietness abated and he began to relax again, and Jim took confidence in that he hadn't needed to remove his foot from Spock's ankle for it to happen.

They retreated indoors to cook, and it was like a routine – Jim occupied himself with the chopping and the frying while Spock went through the cupboards for plates and utensils like he'd never left. It was rhythmic, familiar, relaxed – _easy_.

It was all so _easy_.

They had done this a thousand times before, and Jim was struck with how simple it really was, to weave around each other in a practised dance until they were back out in the yard, cross-legged on the bench with plates in their laps and watching the moths flutter aimlessly around the outdoor lamps, not bothering to speak because it would only have disturbed the peace.

And it was so easy, when Spock shifted to put his empty plate on the paving slabs beneath the bench, to lean over and kiss him, soft and gentle, so much so that they barely touched, and so _easy _to feel him start and relax again, and lean into the contact as though it was four years ago and he'd just moved in and they were so blissfully _happy_…

Jim didn't know how long they spent sitting and kissing – barely even touching but for their lips – but when a low shiver rolled up Spock's spine and a breeze ghosted through the garden, they retreated indoors, silently putting the used dishes into the washer with the same practised, silent ease as before.

Only instead of offering the television or a game of chess or cards or the use of his computer, Jim turned from the washer and slipped his hands loosely over Spock's waist and around his back, fingers resting over his kidneys with no pressure, and kissed him again, a little deeper, a little more exploratory, a little more passionately.

They migrated, from leaning against the kitchen counters to the kitchen doorway to the large couch in the living room, with no speech and hardly any recognition of the motion, eyes closed and fingers lazily stroking over the safe skin of shoulders and necks and faces, until Jim pressed his hips down almost absently and the first shock of real arousal pumped up through his nerves and shot, like fire and acid, into his brain and heart and crotch simultaneously.

"Spock…" he breathed against the man's mouth, and shifted to press carnal kisses into his neck. "Spock, Spock, Spock…"

Hands fluttered at his hair, and the chest underneath his took a long, deep and shaking breath, before his name was echoed to him.

"Spock," Jim pressed down again, his blood beginning to pool slowly south and leaving him somewhat fuzzy in the head. "Spock, please…can we…?"

"I…"

"Bedroom?" Jim whispered, then prised himself from the couch, pulling Spock with him towards the stairs, consuming his mouth in increasingly hungry kisses, nipping at his lips and feeling them swell with a shocking thrill that he hadn't remembered from before.

They made the stairs after several attempts, beginning to fumble with each other's clothes as they approached the master bedroom. Spock had never regained his shirt after the gardening, and Jim lost his on the stairs. Both set of pants were abandoned on the bedroom floor, and when Jim tumbled Spock back into the deep mattress, his fingers were hooked under the waistband of his boxers.

"Can these go?" Jim murmured against Spock's neck.

"I…Jim, it has been…"

"Ssh," Jim breathed, trailing his fingers up to palm Spock's nipples almost absently as he paid particular attention to Spock's collarbone with his teeth. "It's alright. I'll make it good, I'll make it so good, I promise. I'll take care of you…"

Spock arched wordlessly into Jim's fingers, clutching with his own, and they stroked back down to the waistband of the boxers, easing them down swiftly until Spock kicked them free. A moment later, Jim was back, pressing down over him like a living blanket, beginning to thrust lightly against him, those light bites beginning to creep up Spock's neck to his jaw again.

"I've missed this. I've missed you so much. Let me, let me…" Jim whispered, and Spock daringly slid his hands along Jim's flanks and into his briefs, pushing them down until Jim rose up to get rid of them, and fumbled in the bedside drawer. "C-can I?"

Spock didn't answer, but when Jim came back to spread himself over his body again, Spock parted his legs and rocked his hips up in blatant invitation, ripping a surprised groan from Jim's throat.

"Oh God," he murmured, and something popped. A moment later, a slick finger pressed up into Spock's body and he hissed, arching uncontrollably. "Ssh, it's okay. I won't hurt, I swear, I won't hurt…gonna open you up, make you ready for me, it'll be so good, so good…"

He held Spock off two orgasms by grasping at the base of his cock before he finally decided that he was ready, and for a dizzying moment, Spock was bereft of all touch, gasping out his energy on the bed as though abandoned and listening to the quiet crinkle of a wrapper, and then a moment later…

It had been just over a year and a half since he had last done this, and his breathing hitched against the burn, his fingers clutching tight into Jim's back – but Jim had not forgotten, and that first long, slow stroke struck home and had Spock shivering from the overstimulation of the entire thing.

"Jim," he whispered, eyes falling closed. "Jim, Jim, Jim…"

"That's it, that's it baby, that's it…" Jim was babbling, burying his face in Spock's neck as he began to thrust slowly and with his entire body, the bed rocking under the heavy but gentle motion, Spock shivering and quaking under him, grasping at his back and leaving narrow indentations from his nails in the damp skin. "Oh God, you're so gorgeous, so _gorgeous_..."

"_Jim_…"

Jim's arms, slick with sweat from both of them, slid smoothly under Spock's back until they were almost welded together, the friction bringing Spock ever closer to completion, sliding and sticking with every deep thrust, breathing through wet kisses and nonsensical murmurs.

"Jim, Jim, _please_…"

"Please what? What is it, baby, what is it?" Jim murmured, eyes half-lidded, pupils blown so wide the blue was almost completely obscured and _Spock _was in the centre of those eyes, swept away in the bottomless _black_…

"I am…I am falling, I'm…"

"S'okay," Jim gasped out a brief laugh, and kissed away the reply. "'M falling too. S'okay. Just fall, come on gorgeous, fall with me, I've got you, always got you, _love you_…"

The tidal wave broke; Spock came apart at the seams, his very mind pouring out into the universe in a white-out cry, falling into _nothingness_, falling into a state of non-existence that was peaceful, so peaceful, and _the end of all things_…

He came around when Jim returned to the bed, and turned into the arms that slipped around him as though he had never left them, too exhausted to question what had happened and what was happening now.

"I meant it, you know," Jim whispered. "I love you."

Spock tucked his face into the thumping pulse at Jim's neck and kissed it, feeling its rhythm jump slightly at the motion.

"I am falling, Jim," he whispered, and those arms tightened.

"…Me too."


	35. Better

**Notes: this is the final chapter. There will be a brief epilogue after this, and then we're done here!**

* * *

><p><em>Better<em>

The sun rose through the window of the master bedroom, and the blinds cast obnoxious slants of light across the bed, streaking over Jim's face and poking at his sore eyes until he grunted and rolled over to avoid it.

As he had every morning for the past four years or more, his hands instinctively hunted for company on the other side of the bed – and as they had every morning for eighteen months, he found nothing and whatever good mood he might have had at a good night's sleep after a good evening's screw was destroyed.

Except…wait, that wasn't right.

He bolted upright in the bed the moment he registered Spock's absence, the muscles in his hips and legs moaning with the effort after their workout the night before. Spock's abandoned clothes were not on his bedroom floor; his side of the bed was neatly made and cold.

_No_.

Jim shot from the bed and grabbed the first pair of briefs to greet him when he jerked the drawer open. His first panicked check was the bathroom, which stood empty and steamless, and only fifteen seconds after waking he was pounding downstairs, feet bouncing off the old wooden floorboards rudely and he flung the front door open in a panic.

"Good _Lord_!" his elderly neighbour from across the road dropped her pruning shears.

Spock's car was sitting tranquilly in his driveway.

"Sorry, Mrs. Lauren!" he called, and slammed the door again, face _magenta _with embarrassment. Thank God he'd paused to put underwear on.

"Jim?" Spock emerged from the kitchen, of all places, wrapped in the bathrobe that Jim had never gotten rid of. "Did you just…?"

"Yes," Jim said shortly, and flung himself on Spock in a tight hug. "Jesus fuck, you scared me."

"I…what?"

"I thought I'd dreamed it all up, or you'd left or something," Jim mumbled into the cloth-covered shoulder at his disposal. "I thought you'd gone, or you were never here."

"Ah. I see. I apologise, Jim, I did not think that…"

"S'okay," Jim cut him off, tightening his arms. "Just...wow. You're here. You're...really, really here."

"...Yes," Spock sounded faintly bemused, and Jim pulled back to kiss him.

"You know," he breathed over the mouth that had never stopped being _familiar_. "I think...I think maybe we can do this."

Spock's fingers looped together around his back, and he pressed forward for another brief, almost sweet kiss.

"It...seems possible," he admitted into the narrow space between them. "It will take work, and open communication, and _effort_, but..."

"But we can do that," Jim murmured – and jumped when the kettle whistled at them obnoxiously, and reluctantly let Spock go. "Earl Grey?"

"Indeed."

Jim grinned, following him across the kitchen to plaster himself up against his side as he began to pour out a mug. "Hey, um…I meant to ask you last night, but…when do you need to head back?"

"I must be at work tomorrow morning as usual," Spock sounded faintly confused. "Why do you ask?"

"Well…there's a big summer barbeque thing in Kalona – the chapter's having a summer party thing today, so…I was kind of hoping you would come with me."

Spock stilled, and Jim drew back just enough to peer at him.

"Spock?"

"You wish for me to…meet the people who have…"

"The people who've been driven nuts hearing about you? Yeah," Jim murmured, beginning to go red in the face again. "I've kind of done very little but talk about you in those meetings."

"…Why?"

Jim stared at him, then chuckled. "You really don't get it yet, do you?"

"Apparently not."

Jim shrugged. "You're the reason I got better. I did it all so…" he shrugged, dropping his arms to loop around Spock's waist and squeeze tightly. "So I could have this back."

Spock's expression shifted in that strange way it had of not actually _changing_, but somehow displaying something completely different to what it had before. Reading him was a skill that had taken Jim _months _to develop – and yet, apparently, it was like riding a bicycle.

"So will you come?" Jim pressed.

"If that is your wish," Spock's voice dropped to a low murmur as Jim leaned in to kiss him.

"Mm," Jim replied, then grinned. "Were you thinking of making breakfast?"

* * *

><p>The rumble of Jim Kirk's motorbike was a familiar noise, but the fact that he had company was not, and McCoy knew that most of the group were staring as the bike peeled into the parking lot and two tall, lean young men in biking leathers climbed off it.<p>

He had never met the man, but when the helmet was removed to show a neat head of dark hair and a blank expression, McCoy knew _exactly _who Jim Kirk's guest was.

Spock was not quite as he had been in the photographs that McCoy had seen – he was thinner and paler, and bore the lines of a man who had been, until very recently, tense and unhappy all the time. It was similar to the appearance of a man just over a painful divorce, and McCoy supposed, really, that was what it had been, if Spock felt in any way similar to Jim.

Were they back together?

Jim dropped the helmets and leather jackets into the 'bag area' that had been set up at one edge of the gathering, and led Spock by a hand under the elbow towards the group. He looked relaxed and oddly…carefree, in a way that was unfamiliar to McCoy – to any of the assembled group, really – but suited him down to the ground.

Jim's hand slipped down Spock's arm and into his palm, their fingers twining together, and McCoy had his answer.

"Jim," he greeted when they came within range. "Who's this?"

Jim's mouth twitched as though he _knew _that McCoy had guessed, but he tugged Spock forward regardless. "Spock, meet Dr. McCoy. He runs the Kalona meetings. McCoy, this is Spock Grayson."

Spock inclined his head silently, and McCoy raised an eyebrow.

"Ex-boyfriend or current boyfriend?" he asked.

"Current," Jim said without missing a beat, and his hand squeezed around Spock's tightly. The tall-dark-and-robotic man didn't strike McCoy as the type to be affectionate in public, but he didn't seem to mind the treatment. "We've sorted it out. We're giving it another go, and this time, it's going to work."

Spock was _completely _expressionless, and it was quite possibly the weirdest damn thing McCoy had ever seen. He had expected quiet and reserved, just from the way Jim talked about him, but he hadn't expected this blank canvas.

"Well, good luck," he said, tipping his glass (of soda) at them.

"I'll grab us something to eat," Jim said suddenly, kissing Spock's cheek and slipping away towards the barbeque.

"Dr. McCoy."

"Uh-huh?"

"I would like to thank you for the support and assistance that you have given Jim," Spock said evenly and without a trace of inflection. "I do not believe that he would have succeeded without your help. He speaks very highly of you, and I thank you for all you have done for him."

"Can I ask you a personal question?"

"Indeed, though I may not answer it."

"What happened?" McCoy asked bluntly. "He waxes lyrical about you like you invented the universe, the workings of a car engine, and the moon all in one afternoon. He makes out like you're the perfect boyfriend, and apparently you stuck through a fair bit of his alcohol problem. So why did you cut and run when you did?"

Spock stared at him. Perhaps he was trying to work out whether – or how – to answer, or perhaps he was simply going to stare McCoy down until Jim came back; McCoy honestly couldn't tell.

"What did he tell you of the night that I left?"

"Vague things. There was an argument, and a fight. He said he attacked you, but he also implied it wasn't the first time. He always got pretty upset so I didn't push it, and then when he could have handled me pushing it, he was well on the road to recovery and I didn't want to risk a backslide – certainly not after he started chasing you again."

"I see," Spock's eyes suddenly slid sideways, as though remembering something, before he straightened almost imperceptibly. "In short, Dr. McCoy, he was extremely inebriated, we argued, and he lost his temper. The resulting…altercation was somewhat violent in nature, more so than previous conflicts, and I judged the situation too dangerous to continue."

McCoy slowly ran that through a translation. He wasn't stupid – he'd seen countless men going through alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs who had beaten, raped or even murdered their partners in a bad trip or drunken rage. It was entirely possible that Jim, but for a stroke of luck or sheer good sense at the right time, could have become one of those men.

"And you're sure," he said quietly, "that the situation is safe again now?"

Spock inclined his head. "He has never acted with any aggression towards me without the dubious aid of alcohol, therefore yes, I do believe that the situation has been resolved."

"And if he does slip up again?"

"If he acts with aggression again, then I shall leave," Spock said it matter-of-factly, without any of the false bravado or self-righteous bluster of thousands of victims of abuse that McCoy had met before, both at work and at the meets. He was somehow sure that that _would _transcribe, and the physician in him settled again, somewhat mollified.

"I don't think he will, you know," McCoy muttered over his glass.

Spock cocked his head.

"He was a mess," McCoy said flatly. "He was a mess when I met him, and all he had on his mind was you. And then when you let him back into your life; hell, I've seen men just married who aren't that happy. And scared. He's struggled damn hard to stay on the straight and narrow, and it's all been about you. I don't think he's going to risk that again."

Spock opened his mouth, but snapped it shut again, and suddenly Jim was at his elbow, pushing a paper plate into his hands and smiling at him with a quite sickeningly affectionate expression on his disturbingly happy face.

"You guys play nice when I was gone?" Jim asked.

"Sure, Jim," McCoy drawled. "Just a lawyer and an old country sawbones talking nice. What could go wrong?"

Jim snickered. "Sawbones. Sure thing, Bones."

McCoy snorted.

"Okay, you're going to have to indulge me a moment," Jim said, turning to Spock and tugging on his wrist. "C'mon, come with me. I need to do something."

"If it is going to break any public decency laws…"

"Not _that _kind of something. Well, yet," Jim said, dragging him over to a set of chairs that had been arranged for later, when people got tired of standing and tossing Frisbees or whatever the hell else it was people did at summer barbeques. He kept a tight hold on Spock's hand as he stepped up onto one of the chairs and _hollered_:

"Hey! Hey, everyone! Attention! Okay, awesome," he grinned when everyone was staring at him. "You all know me. I'm the little shit with the attitude problem who showed up a year ago with a weird love affair to six packs of Stella."

A low snicker went around the regulars.

"So I thought I'd better make some introductions and shit," Jim continued, holding up Spock's hand in his to show them off. "This is Spock, the boyfriend I've been bending your ears about for months. And thanks for nobody hitting me, by the way, I know I must have sounded like a really depressing stalker on loop."

"You were!" Sandra called, and another laugh went around.

"So, let's be traditional: my name is Jim Kirk, and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober since the fifth of December, and I plan to keep it that way. And most of all: I'm _better_!"

He didn't hear the applause, or the general cooing from the women, or the shutter on a camera, as he turned, jumped from the chair, and pulled Spock into quite possibly the longest – and the best – kiss of his life thus far.


	36. 21st July 2012

**Notes: the epilogue, and this is over. With thanks to _all _of you for your feedback, good and bad, and for sticking with such a momentous project: lows, highs, update delays and all!**

* * *

><p><em>21st July 2012<em>

Spock was – there was no other term for it – shattered.

He rarely visited Tokyo, having little to no fondness for the place or the people, but his father's heart attack had caused his mother to put her foot firmly down about their estrangement and insist, if not order, that Spock return.

It had been a three-week visit, and not once in those three weeks had he been able to relax. Between his father's condition and his mother's still-simmering anger over Spock's decisions in his own life, there had been unspeakable tension. His only highlights had been brief conversations over Skype with Jim, and even those had been few and far between thanks to the time difference and Jim's responsibilities and work patterns.

The stale, recycled air of Des Moines International Airport had never felt so good.

The airport was busy, clustered with young families and elderly couples with oversized luggage, and he moved through them in a daze, letting their noise and smell and weight flow around him like a vaguely unpleasant but not turbulent sea – until a shrill, piercing whistle snapped through the hubbub and caught his attention.

Jim stood, all biceps in his white shirt and uncombed fair hair, just inside of the doors. His leather jacket, probably still unwashed, hung over one arm lazily, and his jeans were both falling apart and attempting to fall _down_, and this was all topped off by the fact that he was, quite obnoxiously, wearing those excuses for sneakers that Spock had banned from coming into his personal space as they were quite obviously a biohazard…

He looked obnoxious, slovenly, arrogant and _offensive_, with the set of his shoulders and the smirk and the fact that he refused to move around the other tourists…

He had never looked more beautiful.

"Hey," Jim's drawl sounded thick after the clipped, hushed whispers of Japanese and his mother's fractured mix of Oregon accent and Japanese language, and his arms felt heavy as they came up to wrap Spock into a weighted hug.

His skin burned – from the heat of the car in July, perhaps – and Spock moulded himself to it gladly.

"Welcome home, gorgeous," Jim murmured, squeezing him tightly. "I have fresh sheets on the bed, vegetarian panaeng curry in the microwave, and absolutely no floral arrangements anywhere in the house."

"Floral arrangements?" Spock asked, still not disentangling himself.

"Yeah, a helpful tip: the flowers for the wedding _reek_," Jim said, and chuckled. "I advise that you sit at the back of the church tomorrow."

"Noted," Spock said, and Jim stepped back, squeezing his shoulders once more before taking his suitcase. "How is Sulu?"

"Panicking," Jim said flatly. "I left him with a paper bag and the seating plans for the reception. I'm not sure if he thinks Janice is going to leave him at the altar, or whether he's going to leave _her_."

The brilliant sunlight of a July afternoon was warm, unlike the harsh ricochet of sun off glass walls in downtown Tokyo, and some of the tension finally began to leech out of Spock's neck.

"How did it go?" Jim asked quietly.

"It…went."

"Is your Dad okay?"

"He is recovering, yes," Spock said, glad to be speaking of something…tangible. "He required surgery to repair a faulty valve, but he is recovering at home now."

"Good," Jim reached for his hand and squeezed it as they approached the car, which looked like it had sat in the path of a tornado in Spock's absence. "And your Mom?"

"…She is still…displeased."

"Oh," Jim sighed, wrestling briefly with the trunk to open it, before turning and giving Spock a rueful smile. "Oh well. Not much we can do about that."

"Nothing, in fact," Spock said.

"She'll come around eventually," Jim soothed, slamming the trunk again. "It might take ten years, but…eventually."

"It was…"

When Spock trailed off, Jim paused and reached out for his hand again, barely touching him but to stroke clumsy fingers over his skin. "It was what?"

"It was not home."

Jim's face did some sort of strange, spastic twitch between a grimace and a smile, and he stepped forward into another heavy, grounding hug that wrapped muscle and tendon and blood – sheer humanity – around Spock's frame and increased the pressure until he buckled into the hold shamelessly.

"Welcome home," he repeated quietly, his voice little more than a murmur in Spock's ear. After a moment more, the heat became too much – July in Des Moines was offensive to Jim's sensibilities, even after a quarter of a century living in the same state, and he backed down with a brief kiss. Someone in the parking lot, from some distance, yelled some jeer, and Jim's returning, "Fuck off!" was almost cheerful. "Come on," he added. "Panaeng curry. I even made that weird watermelon sorbet thing you like."

"It is not…"

"It's weird," Jim said flatly, waiting until Spock had opened the passenger door before throwing himself into the driver's car and coaxing the flailing engine into life with a gritty roar. As he settled, the last fraying thread over his left knee snapped and left, finally, a complete, perfectly circular hole.

Whether it was because of Sulu's occupying the guest room overnight in adherence to some bizarre custom of not seeing the bride before the wedding, or whether it down to having been busy in the last three weeks in the run-up to said wedding, Spock neither knew nor cared – the fact remained that Jim essentially took the scenic route, avoiding the major roads and thoroughfares and winding the car through back roads and narrow tracks under a blazing, and slowly sinking, Iowan sun.

The car smelled of him – it smelled of heavy, dark leather with a faint underlay of engine oil and the standard shaving cream that cost fifty cents from the gas station store. The dashboard was sticky and dark with Pepsi stains, and the passenger window clanged fully down halfway into their journey and refused to be coaxed back into life. The car juddered, its suspension long since sacrificed to time and overuse, and the radio sputtered into life only twice. The leather on the seats was cracked and printed creases right onto Spock's pants, flaking off black smears onto his shirt – and he melted back into the heat and mess of it, contented.

Two and a half weeks in Tokyo, and these were the things he had…

"I have…"

Jim glanced at him quizzically, and made a prompting noise.

"I have…missed you."

Jim's face twitched again, but he said nothing for several more minutes, until the car rumbled upon a field entrance and he pulled over, hugging the fencepost and tucking them out of the way before unbuckling his seatbelt and twisting sideways, leaning right over to kiss him.

This, too, Spock had missed. Not the kissing but the – love. The _way _that Jim kissed him, out of nowhere and as though it would tell him, all over again, what they had. As though eighteen days in Tokyo could have induced some memory-loss; Jim kissed him with everything, and as intently as the first time.

"I love you," Jim whispered, his voice almost throaty – swollen with _something_ – and his eyes too big and too blue from here. "I just…I have to…"

He shifted, drawing himself round to sit fully sideways. He leaned back some, but took both of Spock's hands in his, curling his rough, workman's fingers around them as though they were simultaneously precious and indestructible.

"Thank you," he said.

"For what?"

"For everything. For giving me a second chance. For being so in love with me that you had to. For learning to trust me again. For taking that leap of faith in the first place. For forgiving me, even though you shouldn't have done. For coming back."

"Jim..."

"No, hear me out. I can't believe I got lucky enough to get you back. I can't believe that I ever managed to turn that around. And it was the hardest damn thing I've ever done, but it was worth every minute of it. And it's _still _the hardest damn thing I'm doing, and it's hard because it'll never go away, and when we argue or we have a fight and I just…I just _remember_, and it _hurts_ – and then you're still there. You're still _here_. And I can't…I still can't _believe _that, so when I want a drink, I just have to look at you and suddenly, I don't want it any more. You just have this power – you make me _better_, without even trying, and I can never thank you enough for it."

"You do not have to thank me at all," Spock said quietly.

"Yes, I do," Jim disagreed. "Every time I'm tempted and you're right there to stop me, and the way you don't even have to _do _anything to stop me. And every time I wake up and you're asleep in the same bed, and every time you come down for the weekends, and when you agreed to let me whisk you off this year for your birthday – I have to thank you. Because you could have said no. Maybe you _should _have said no, but you didn't, and I'll be grateful for the rest of my life for that."

Spock's fingers twitched involuntarily at the – not the words, but the _tone_, and Jim brought them up to kiss the knuckles.

"Hear me out?" he whispered against the skin.

Spock nodded once.

"I love you," Jim said flatly. "I love you even when you're being sarcastic and pedantic. I love you when you're too tired after the drive down to do anything but doze on my couch. I love you when you have bed hair and morning breath. I love you when you're sick. I love you when you're irritable and touchy like a cat with its tail trodden on. I love you when you leave messages on my phone complaining about that woman at work. I love you when I get to wake up next to you and just hear you breathing. I even love you when you snore, and when you deny it. I love you when you're here, and I love you when you're not, and I even love your scars. I just...I love you – and I think I always will, so..."

He broke off, popping open the glove box and catching the lid before it hit Spock's knees with its broken grace.

"I had this all planned out," he said. "I was going to…tomorrow night. I was going to – but…but right now…you just, you're just…"

He fumbled with something – it clinked – and then a flash of gold caught Spock's eye, and his breath caught somewhere between his lungs and his throat.

"Would you do me the honour of moving back in with me?" Jim breathed, turning the gold in his fingers until it sat in his palm for Spock's inspection – for his approval.

Or his rejection.

Slowly, Spock drew his own house and car keys from his pocket, took the keyring from Jim's fingers, and slotted the two expertly together, the golden key to the Kirk house clanking as it fell to hit the car key.

"Yes," he murmured, and Jim surged to kiss him, kissing awkwardly around a face-splitting grin and the workings of his throat that hinted at either a cheer or a sob, clumsily trying to convey everything without a language in which to express it.

"Let's be traditional," Jim whispered into the barest millimetres that separated them.

"Alright?"

Jim cupped his face and beamed at him, overwhelming _joy _seeping out of every inch of his expression. "My name is Jim Kirk. I have been sober for over a year and a half – and my life is just about _perfect_."

**END.**


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